¿Cuánt(o/a)(s) cuesta(n)?

Question

When asking for a price of

1 feminine object, do I say ¿Cuánta cuesta?

more than 1 feminine objects: do I say ¿Cuántas cuestan?

1 masculine object: do I say ¿Cuánto cuesta?

more than 1 masculine objects: do I say ¿Cuántos cuestan?

Excellent question. Both Pumpkin's and Chileno's answers are correct :) - Vida_de_Scott, May 13, 2013

Answer 1

Not exactly...

The gender is applied to the object you are paying with and not to the ones you're paying for.

Cuánto(s) (dinero(s)) cuesta(n) esto(s)/esta(s).

**Cuánta plata cuesta(n) esto(s)/esta(s)?

Cuantas monedas de a cien cuesta(n) esta(s)/esto(s)

Esto/esta refers to what you want to pay for.

Answer 2

Almost! Actually, for one object, masculine or feminine, you would say "¿Cuánto cuesta?"

And for more than one object of either gender, it would be: "¿Cuánto cuestan?"

The adjective doesn't refer to the object that costs, but to money. Think of this question as asking "How much money does it cost" or "¿Cúanto dinero cuesta(n)?" This will show you why the "Cuánto" does not change form.

Answer 3

I agree with Chileno's answer, except that, in ordinary usage dinero is an uncountable noun so Cuántos dineros doesn't make sense in this context.

This question made me wonder about a related topic and I wondered if the most common usage for asking how much something costs in Spanish would be "How much (money/dinero) does something cost?" which would be ¿Cuánto cuesta? or "How many (dólares / pesos) does something cost?" which would be ¿Cuántos cuesta? or ¿Cuántas cuesta? if the implied unit was the old Spanish peseta.

To research this I used an admittedly unscientific method of doing a Google search and looking at the number of hits for different phrases. Here are my key findings.

¿Cuánto cuesta? 10,300,000 How much (money/dinero) does it cost?

¿Cuántos cuesta? 14,600 How many (dollars / pesos ) does it cost?

¿Cuántos dólares cuesta? 4,860 How many dollars does it cost?

¿Cuántos pesos cuesta? 1,010 How many pesos does it cost?

The clear winner is ¿Cuánto cuesta? or simply "How much (money) does it cost."

I sort of expected this, but I was surprised that it had 705 times more hits than ¿Cuántos cuesta?" and that the phrases using a specific mention of the currencies had even less hits.

Is there a more common phrase to ask what something costs in dollars or pesos or does everybody just ask ¿Cuánto cuesta?