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Glite Dictionary
great pains

great pains

9 4.2
A lot of careful effort to do something well
  • noun
translation icon : grandes esfuerzos
  • The teacher took great pains to ensure every student understood the lesson.
  • take great pains
  • go to great pains
  • great pains to avoid

We over monitor ourselves and we take great pains to do things just the way they want them.

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Examples

  • Great pains had also been taken to make the house less frigid than the British norm.

    Academic text (1999)

  • I've taken great pains to arrange your diet properly.

    Topper (1937)

  • His lawyer took great pains to bring that out.

    12 Angry Men (1997)

  • So, we take great pains to keep people informed.

    Academic text (1990)

  • Whether it is to become thin or to stay thin, women take great pains to moderate their figures.

    Academic text (1992)

  • We went to great pains to put these pairings together.

  • We each went to great pains to keep our identities a secret, so we could not betray each other.

    Fiction book (1992)

  • Donna and Barry go to great pains to explain that the bags are fully recyclable.

    Blog text (29)

  • For this reason, David's reading is of great importance; David takes great pains to depict his childhood and convey an impression of his lively imagination.

    Academic text (2004)

  • Writing in the radically different genre of historical fiction, Doctorow similarly takes great pains to "straighten out" the Collyers' desires and ambiguous object choices.

    Academic text (2016)

Synonyms

pains
vsgreat pains
3 4.7

Great care and effort to do something well

means the same but is phrased differently

Antonyms

indifference
71 4.6

Lack of interest or concern about something

carelessness
16 2.8

Lack of attention that causes mistakes or accidents

How Hard

great pains
9 4.2
application
22 3.4
effort
∞ 1.0

Surface Forms

great pains plural
great pain singular

Morphology

great + pains

The meaning is directly compositional: 'great' functions as an intensifier applied to 'pains' understood as careful effort, so 'great pains' straightforwardly means a large amount of effort. A B1 learner who knows the constituents can derive this sense without special idiomatic knowledge; the intensifier+noun pattern is cross-linguistically common and predictable.

Etymology

Great pains comes from the picture of someone working so hard that the pains are great, like sore muscles after heavy work, showing how much effort they used. That's why today great pains means 'a lot of effort or care'.