Word.ws English Dictionary

paying the price

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

Meaning of pay the price

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)

  1. (idiomatic) 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

Questions about paying the price

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

Words near paying the price in the dictionary

  1. paying the bills
  2. paying the fiddler
  3. paying the freight
  4. paying the penalty
  5. paying the piper
  6. paying the price
  7. paying the rent
  8. paying the ultimate price
  9. paying through the nose
  10. paying to play
  11. paying towards

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: paying the price (page history and authors); 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: “paying the price.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/paying_the_price. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.