Word.ws English Dictionary

paying dearly

paying dearly is the present participle and gerund of pay dearly.

Meaning of pay dearly

Verb

pay dearly (third-person singular simple present pays dearly, present participle paying dearly, simple past and past participle paid dearly)

  1. (figuratively) To suffer as a result of one's actions.
    • Both the G.W.R. and the L.S.W.R. had to pay dearly for the privilege of entering the Royal Borough, for the Prince Consort drove a hard bargain with each.1949 September and October, “Notes and News: The Windsor Centenary”, in Railway Magazine, page 340

Questions about paying dearly

What is paying dearly the present participle and gerund of?
Paying dearly is the present participle and gerund of pay dearly.

Words near paying dearly in the dictionary

  1. paying
  2. paying a visit
  3. paying attention
  4. paying back
  5. paying back in someone's own coin
  6. paying dearly
  7. paying dividends
  8. paying down
  9. paying for itself
  10. paying for one's whistle
  11. paying forward

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: paying dearly (page history and authors); pay dearly (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “paying dearly.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/paying_dearly. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.