pay the price
pay the price verb: to incur the negative consequences of (one’s own or someone else’s) actions or decisions.
Verb
pay the price (third-person singular simple present pays the price, present participle paying the price, simple past and past participle paid the price)
- To incur the negative consequences of (one’s own or someone else’s) actions or decisions.
- Yet United may have paid the price for overconfidence as they completely lost their concentration after 10 minutes to let Wolves back in.2011 February 5, Chris Whyatt, “Wolverhampton 2 - 1 Man Utd”, in BBC
- Shadow Transport Secretary Louise Haigh said ahead of the vote: "Northern communities are, once again, paying the price for broken Tory promises on rail.2021 December 29, “Labour demands NPR action after "rail betrayal"”, in RAIL, number 947, page 7
- Synonyms:
- face the music, pay the piper
Synonyms of pay the price
Forms of pay the price
| third-person singular present | pays the price |
|---|---|
| present participle | paying the price |
| past participle | paid the price |
| past | paid the price |
| alternative form | pay the penalty |
Questions about pay the price
- What does pay the price mean?
- Pay the price means to incur the negative consequences of (one’s own or someone else’s) actions or decisions.
- What part of speech is pay the price?
- Pay the price is a verb.
- What is the past tense of pay the price?
- The past tense of pay the price is paid the price.
Words near pay the price in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: pay the price (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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Cite this entry: “pay the price.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pay_the_price. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.