What's the difference between abject and lowly?

Abject


Definition:

  • (a.) Cast down; low-lying.
  • (a.) Sunk to a law condition; down in spirit or hope; degraded; servile; groveling; despicable; as, abject posture, fortune, thoughts.
  • (a.) To cast off or down; hence, to abase; to degrade; to lower; to debase.
  • (n.) A person in the lowest and most despicable condition; a castaway.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) He is an expert on the public health problems that plague El Paso and the other cities along the international border, all of which are exacerbated by abject poverty and a burgeoning population.
  • (2) During his long stint in the witness stand, Harris was questioned at length about why he expressed abject remorse to the father for his actions, offering a little more credible explanation than he felt ending the relationship had upset the woman.
  • (3) And while Altmejd presents sexual scenes of cartoonish horror and disgust, Lucas's art has embraced lavatorial humour, abjection, self-denigration, the pithy sculptural one-liner and the obscene gesture.
  • (4) An Israeli commentator said of the first of them: "when one looks through all the lofty phraseology, all the deliberate disinformation, the hundreds of pettifogging sections, sub-sections, appendices and protocols, one clearly recognises that the Israeli victory was absolute and Palestine defeat abject."
  • (5) It is an abject failure to take the rights of females seriously.
  • (6) Obviously Pantilimon is more abject than Hart,” says Graham Lees “and Demichelis must have lied on his CV but why does no one bemoan the wretchedness, sorry, opportunity gifted to Sunderland, of Nasri’s selection?
  • (7) Indeed, we have been reminded recently of the abject poverty that many have fallen into, needing to use food banks or choose between "eating and heating" and the need for charitable institutions to step forward and help the needy.
  • (8) Now, millions of working people who would otherwise be languishing in abject poverty depend on these tax credits.
  • (9) It was an abject defeat for a leader whose response to the migration crisis deserved better.
  • (10) Meanwhile the victims are sitting there in abject poverty and have not received any compensation."
  • (11) The aim was to secure a politically and militarily allied government in a strategically important country, a mission which David Cameron amusingly declared this week to have been "accomplished" despite the western alliance's abject failure over 12 years to defeat that Taliban's rag-tag army and the refusal of the corrupt Hamid Karzai administration to play ball over the country's long-term future .
  • (12) But it bears testament, too, to the Brown government's abject failure to give a comprehensible account of itself that the opposition should find such easy pickings.
  • (13) It's all there: sexual and social confusion, vulnerability and violence, alienation and loneliness, the oscillation between feeling abject and worthless and wanting to take over the world, the fantasies of power and revenge.
  • (14) "Outright hostility, abject surrender - that's what you have seen in the past.
  • (15) The picture you have painted is one of abject squalor made worse by a generally lazy approach to hygiene.
  • (16) Smith could not have been more abjectly humiliated.
  • (17) Given the abject failure of much of the western media to scrutinise its actions – at least until it's too late – it may believe it can get away with it.
  • (18) He ended up with five during the Euro 2016 qualifying campaign but all came in the fixtures against an abject Gibraltar, featuring a hat-trick in the home game scored, memorably, from a combined total of eight yards.
  • (19) Mick Cash, RMT general secretary, said: “The abject failure by Southern rail in yesterday’s talks to take the safety issues seriously has left us with no option but to confirm further action.
  • (20) Recent weeks have seen a succession of good news stories from Iraq, including the ceremonial reopening of the national museum, whose looting in 2003 symbolised the abject failure to plan for the post-war period.

Lowly


Definition:

  • (a.) Not high; not elevated in place; low.
  • (a.) Low in rank or social importance.
  • (a.) Not lofty or sublime; humble.
  • (a.) Having a low esteem of one's own worth; humble; meek; free from pride.
  • (adv.) In a low manner; humbly; meekly; modestly.
  • (adv.) In a low condition; meanly.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) You will have to offer leadership and a sense of belonging to the civil service's lowly clerks and frontline staff in the Department for Work and Pensions, struggling not just with Iain Duncan Smith's fantasies of benefit rationalisation, but sharp contractors snapping at their heels.
  • (2) Chelsea, racism and the Premier League’s role | Letters Read more Mighty Manchester United had just been humbled by lowly Leicester City, battered 5-3.
  • (3) Pakistan repeated the trick in the 1990s, sending jihadists to stoke insurgency in Indian-held Kashmir and giving massive assistance to the Taliban, the once lowly mullahs’ movement that had seized control of Afghanistan in 1989.
  • (4) It has exalted the lowly and brought down the mighty from their seats.
  • (5) But one might have imagined Corbyn would have used the opportunity to send one of the really big power players of the new shadow cabinet – his transport spokeswoman Lilian Greenwood, say, or Nia Griffith, who has the Wales portfolio – rather than his lowly shadow chancellor.
  • (6) Historically, our masters have always imagined we lowly peasants will digest information more easily if it is written, for example, in a speech bubble coming out of the mouth of an imaginary squirrel pedestrian in yellow loon pants.
  • (7) Malignant neoplasias consisted of tumorously proliferated, lowly differentiated sebaceous cells.
  • (8) One is a guy who has to try and take a lowly band of unknowns up against far better equipped adversaries, while having been tempted to join the other side, and the other one is … oh, hang on" – James Thomson.
  • (9) Within six years of beginning as a lowly prop assistant, he led the show to national syndication and had an Emmy to show for his efforts.
  • (10) One dev says: "My biggest bugbear at the moment (on my lowly 3GS) is the number of times app quit due to memory shortages, or because they've taken too long to load.
  • (11) An evening transformed by Adomah’s second-half liberation from the bench – (the winger created the excellent Stuani’s second) – ended with Boro looking the more convincing promotion candidates, but Brentford had played well enough to suggest their current lowly position is a false one.
  • (12) With such knowledge comes a predictable illusion of power, though this is all too regularly punctured by the indignity of being kicked out of shiny receptions and told to use an entrance more befitting of our lowly status – or of having my pronunciation of “Southwark Street” incorrectly corrected by a receptionist, who gives her colleague a sidelong smirk, commiserating over my supposed ignorance.
  • (13) In "Marching (As Seen from the Left File)", for instance, he describes the men from the perspective of one of them and in "Break of Day in the Trenches" he identifies with the lowly rat against the "haughty athletes".
  • (14) Basic literacy and numeracy skills are low, meaning that the children who drop out of school are on course for a life in lowly-paid jobs.
  • (15) Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies trace the meteoric rise of Cromwell from the lowly son of a blacksmith to a ruthless political leader.
  • (16) In a telling Japanese ballet production of Bizet's Carmen a few years ago, Carmen was portrayed as a career woman who stole company secrets to get ahead and then framed her lowly security-guard lover José.
  • (17) Material released from the highly tumorigenic cells in response to increased cell density was also fucosylated (whereas shed material from lowly tumorigenic cells was not), suggesting a biological role for shed fucosylated antigens in tumor aggression.
  • (18) The G + C content of the A. nidulans genome is close to 50%, indicating little overall mutational bias, and so the codon usage of lowly expressed genes is as expected in the absence of selection pressure at silent sites.
  • (19) But my colleagues at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - where I spent the summer of 2000 as a lowly research assistant - questioned such reserve.
  • (20) There has been a decade-long legal battle by the Guardian involving rulings by 16 different judges, stretching from a lowly information tribunal to the supreme court, the highest in the land.