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OneKitly

costly

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈkɒst.li//

Of high cost; expensive.

adjective

  1. 1

    Of high cost; expensive.

    a costly activity

    a costly error

    In the early days troubles were experienced with oscillation from the rod drive and with the transformers, but were overcome later, and these machines performed useful service until superseded by more modern locomotives less costly in maintenance.

    Individual mistakes proved costly for Wigan who, particularly after the half-time introduction of Hugo Rodallega, dominated for long periods.

Etymology

From Middle English costly, costely, costeley, equivalent to cost + -ly.

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of costly coloursShort for costly colours.

    Costly is a simpler game than cribbage.

Forms

comparative
costlier, more costly
superlative
costliest, most costly
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).