[pl.]
IDIOMS
be at pains to do sth to put a lot of effort into doing sth correctly:
She was at great pains to stress the advantages of the new system.
for your pains (especially BrE, often ironic) as payment, reward or thanks for sth you have done:
I told her what I thought and got a mouthful of abuse for my pains!
take (great) pains (to do sth)
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for pains is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is pains a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, pains is tagged as noun.
Does pains appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — pains appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.