pay through the nose

To overpay for something

Mike reluctantly handed over the money. He was paying through the nose for this spare tire, but since he was on the road in the middle of nowhere, he had no other choice.

News & Articles

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• Spies Like Us: How We All Helped Build Prism
  It used to be that the National Security Agency and its ilk had to pay through the nose for the latest in spying technology. The supercomputer specialist Cray ( CRAY ) , for example, would receive government funds and come out with a new multimillion-dollar machine specially tuned for “pattern matching” and then sell the system to three-letter agencies.
  June 12, 2013 - BusinessWeek