Word.ws English Dictionary

cost-effective

cost-effective adjective: returning a benefit that justifies the initial investment; economical.

Adjective

cost-effective (comparative more cost-effective, superlative most cost-effective)

  1. Returning a benefit that justifies the initial investment; economical.
    • "Secondly, we have to find more cost-effective ways of electrifying. And we've had a real breakthrough in the last couple of years in terms of bridge clearances and immunisation, meaning we've been able to take hundreds of millions of pounds off the cost of electrification.2020 May 20, Andrew Haines talks to Stefanie Foster, “Repurpose rail for the 2020s”, in Rail, page 33

Forms of cost-effective

comparativemore cost-effective
superlativemost cost-effective

Words formed from cost-effective

Questions about cost-effective

What does cost-effective mean?
Cost-effective means returning a benefit that justifies the initial investment; economical.
What part of speech is cost-effective?
Cost-effective is an adjective.

Words near cost-effective in the dictionary

  1. cost-benefit analysis
  2. cost-book
  3. cost-books
  4. cost-conscious
  5. cost-cutting
  6. cost-effective
  7. cost-effectively
  8. cost-effectiveness
  9. cost-efficient
  10. cost-free
  11. cost-prohibitive

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cost-effective (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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