The short answer: when used as a noun, the "price" is the amount charged for something, and the "cost" is the amount paid for something.
When a person is discussing buying something at retail, the most common noun used for the amount charged by the seller is "price."
I wanted to buy a white cotton jumpsuit, but the price was too high, so I didn't.
When used as a noun, "cost" refers specifically to the amount paid by someone for something. It is most often used in an accounting or business context.
Our cost per item is three dollars and our gross revenue per item is sixty dollars. That's a fifty-seven dollar profit on each jumpsuit sold!
It is not exactly wrong to use "cost" as a noun in the same way you would "price":
I wanted to buy a white cotton jumpsuit, but the cost was too high.
However, this is not as idiomatic, at least in American English; it sounds a bit melodramatic. You would be more likely to use "cost" as a noun where it is understood that you are discussing the impact on your finances, rather than the amount the store asked for the item:
Sure, it was expensive, but the cost isn't what's important: it's how the jumpsuit makes you feel.
Confusingly, you can use "cost" as a verb to describe the amount charged for an item:
That's a lovely jumpsuit; how much does it cost?
"Price" as a verb is used only for the act of setting a price:
Why would you price these jumpsuits so high? We poor students need jumpsuits, too!
"Extend" is strictly a verb.
She extends her hand in friendship.
He extended the antenna, hoping to get better reception.
"Extent" is strictly a noun.
To what extent does physical exercise relieve moodiness?
She walked the extent of the plank, then descended into the sea below.
Best Answer
We can find the exact same quote in the Wiktionary entries for both words:
So in terms of meaning, they're generally interchangeable. One difference, pointed out by BobRodes, is that perhaps is more formal and polite, while maybe is less so. But there's a good deal of overlap, so it's not unusual to see both terms used in the same passage.
Although it's rare, one difference is that maybe can be used informally as a noun. Here's a definition from The Free Dictionary:
It's technically possible for perhaps to be turned into a noun the same way, but it's comparatively rare, perhaps because *perhapses sounds so clunky. When I searched The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), I found 53 results for
maybesand 0 results forperhapses.Now that we've talked about maybe as a noun, I want to get back to the main question: what is the difference in meaning between the two words?
I think in certain situations, it might be possible to come up with a very slight difference in meaning, but most of the time I think there's too much overlap to claim there's a real distinction. My intuitive feeling is that maybe may express a slightly greater degree of uncertainty in some situations. (But perhaps not; I've been unable to come up with an example where the words can't be reasonably interchanged.)
Both words are common, but maybe appears to be slightly more common. In both COCA and GloWbE, I find more instances of
maybethanperhaps:But oddly, I find the opposite in Google Books Ngram Viewer, which claims there are more than 3 times as many instances of
perhaps; though when I set it to the fiction sub-corpus, the ratio is closer to 1. I suppose this supports the idea of the formality difference between the two.