Pay Through the Nose

"Pay through the nose" means to pay an excessively high or extortionate price for something, far more than is reasonable or fair. It implies that the cost is so great it is almost a form of coercion. This page traces the most credible documented origins of the phrase and explains how it developed in English.

How to Use This Page

Read the history section for the competing origin theories and the evidence that supports each. The modern usage section gives examples across everyday and professional contexts. The similar phrases section covers related idioms about high prices and financial hardship.

The History

The origin of "pay through the nose" is not definitively established, and several theories have been proposed over the years.

The most frequently cited origin connects the phrase to a tax imposed by Viking invaders in Ireland in the ninth century. According to this account, Danish invaders levied a tax on the Irish, and those who could not or would not pay had their noses slit as punishment. This practice, known as the "nose tax" in some historical accounts, would have given the phrase "paying through the nose" a very literal and brutal meaning. The problem with this theory is that direct documentary evidence linking the specific phrase to this historical practice is thin, and it may be a folk etymology that grew up to explain the phrase after the fact.

A second theory connects "through the nose" to an older sense of being led by the nose, meaning to be controlled or coerced. A person who pays through the nose is being compelled to pay more than they would freely choose, as though being led helplessly by the nose. This connection to "led by the nose" is linguistically plausible and fits the idiom's connotation of unwilling, excessive payment.

The phrase appears in English writing from the seventeenth century. A 1672 work by Roger L'Estrange uses "pay through the nose" to mean paying a heavy, unreasonable price. By the eighteenth century it was well established in both British and American English with its modern meaning.

How It Is Used Today

In everyday speech: "I would love to stay in a hotel on the seafront, but you pay through the nose for the location."

In consumer advice: "Always compare prices online. Tourist areas make you pay through the nose for ordinary meals."

In business: "The company paid through the nose for the acquisition, and the expected synergies never materialised."

Similar Phrases

"Cost an arm and a leg" conveys the same idea of extreme cost. "Daylight robbery" is a British expression meaning a price so high it is tantamount to theft. "A rip-off" describes a price that is unreasonably high relative to the value received. "Extortionate" is the formal adjective for this situation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Viking nose-tax origin confirmed? It is widely repeated but not firmly confirmed. The historical practice of violent punishment for non-payment of tax is plausible in a Viking context, but the direct link to the English phrase relies on secondary and speculative sources rather than documentary evidence.

Is "pay through the nose" stronger than "cost an arm and a leg"? Both convey excessive cost, but "pay through the nose" has a stronger implication of coercion or being taken advantage of, while "cost an arm and a leg" focuses more on the sacrifice required to afford something.

When did the phrase first appear in writing? The earliest known written use dates to 1672 in Roger L'Estrange's work. It was well established in English by the early eighteenth century.

Is the phrase used in both British and American English? Yes. Both use "pay through the nose" with the same meaning and roughly the same frequency. It is fully established across all major English-speaking regions.

The phrase in print, date by date

The history section above gives the seventeenth century as the period when the phrase appears, and one dated example. The citation record is fuller than that. The table below sets out the uses in print that carry a date, a title and a page reference, taken from the citation list in the standard dictionary entry for the phrase.

Two observations follow from the list. The phrase was already fully figurative by 1650, because Walker's sentence uses it as a metaphor for a bad bargain rather than for anything done to a nose. And the early citations run across political controversy, translated French fiction, a society novel and a magazine column within two centuries, which is the behaviour of an established idiom rather than a new coinage.

Where the page's dating section is narrower than the record

The FAQ above states that the earliest known written use dates to 1672 in Roger L'Estrange's work, and that the phrase was well established by the early eighteenth century. The citation list puts a 1672 use in Andrew Marvell's The Rehearsal Transpros'd, at page 270, and carries one earlier use, from 1650. L'Estrange and Marvell were on opposite sides of the same controversy and both published in 1672, which is a plausible route to the confusion, but the citation as it stands attributes the 1672 line to Marvell.

Nothing else on the page turns on that point, and the printed sentence has been left as it was written. The 1650 date is also worth a caution rather than a claim: an antedating from a single transcription is exactly the kind of evidence that needs checking against the printed original before it displaces an older date.

The nautical account

The explanation with the strongest scholarly backing is not the one about noses being cut. Anatoly Liberman, in Origin Uncertain, published by Oxford University Press in 2024, argues that the phrase is probably a nautical term, drawing an analogy between paying a large sum of money and paying out an anchor's cable or chain through the hawseholes at the bow of a ship, with the bow standing in for the nose. His chapter on the subject occupies pages 302 and 303, and a shorter version appeared on the Oxford University Press blog on 13 October 2010.

The idea is older than Liberman's book. He takes it from a letter by Richard Edgcumbe published in Notes and Queries on 3 December 1898, in the ninth series, volume II, number 49, at pages 456 and 457. Edgcumbe wrote as a former midshipman and described the expression as originally a common one on board ship, alongside the orders to pay out the cable and pay out handsomely. His argument is that a ship's nose is its bow and its nostrils are the hawse holes, so paying out a heavy chain cable through the nose is a natural image for a large and unwelcome disbursement. He admitted the suggestion was a conjecture and asked to be forgiven for sounding dogmatic.

The nose tax account, and what it rests on

The version most often repeated online is that the phrase comes from a tax levied on the Irish by Viking or Danish invaders, with noses slit as the punishment for non-payment. The linguistic form of the claim is Old Norse nef-gildi, meaning a poll tax payable to the king, with nose serving as a synecdoche for a person, on the basis that the Irish paid such a tax to the Vikings who held territory in Ireland between 795 and 1169.

Two objections are recorded against it. The first is chronological: the English phrase is attested only centuries after that period, so the account requires the expression to have travelled several hundred years and outlived the tax that supposedly produced it, without leaving a trace in the interval. The second concerns a related variant in which the god Odin is said to have levied a tax on the nose of every Swede. Liberman's response to that one is procedural, in the sense that it is not clear why a god would require money at all.

How the dictionaries classify the origin

The dictionary entry for the phrase lists it as of uncertain origin and categorises it under English terms with unknown etymologies. The entry also gives an earlier related form, bored through the nose, used in the seventeenth century to mean swindled in a transaction, with a citation collected in 1898 by J. H. MacMichael in Notes and Queries at page 231. The Oxford English Dictionary's entry for the phrase sits under its entry for the word nose. Various dictionaries state plainly that the origin has been lost.

That classification is the answer to the question the page asks, and it is not a defeat. A phrase can be fully documented in use from the middle of the seventeenth century, and simultaneously have no recoverable origin for the image behind it, because the connection between a nose and an excessive price was made in speech before anyone wrote it down.

What would settle the question

Four checks would move this from a set of competing accounts to a settled history.

1. A dated print reference earlier than 1650, with a page number, and an inspection of the original rather than a transcription.
2. A bridge between the Norse sense of a nose-tax and the English expression, in the form of a text from the centuries in between that uses the image.
3. A shipping record or a manual that uses the bow or hawsehole sense of nose in the same period as the earliest citations, which would put Edgcumbe's conjecture on a documentary footing.
4. For each popular account, the identity of the first printed statement of it. Where every repetition traces to one Victorian guess, the repetition count is not evidence.

Until at least one of those lands, the honest statement is the one the dictionaries make: the phrase is more than three and a half centuries old, its meaning has been stable throughout, and the reason it says "nose" is unknown.

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