What's the difference between abstruse and comprehend?

Abstruse


Definition:

  • (a.) Concealed or hidden out of the way.
  • (a.) Remote from apprehension; difficult to be comprehended or understood; recondite; as, abstruse learning.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Ed Miliband should be out and proud about his abstruse interests, his Masters in economics, his political obsession, his prioritising of the mental over the physical.
  • (2) Britain's sodden fields mean the debate about climate change is now no longer confined to some abstruse problem affecting glaciers in far-off countries.
  • (3) As if to underline how far leftfield Radiohead have subsequently shifted, it's followed by the instrumental Feral, which in its live incarnation – scattered rhythms overlaid with echoing vocal loops and waves of electronic noise – is arguably the most abstruse and uncommercial piece of music you're ever likely to hear booming around an arena venue.
  • (4) At its best, British public service broadcasting wants to share the best with everyone, it takes topics or themes which may seem abstruse or unapproachable – the science of the solar system, what you can learn about civilisation through physical artefacts – and then brings them to life with such conviction and creativity that they reach deep across a society.
  • (5) Thus the abstruse nomenclature in common use is avoided.
  • (6) Innovative dance music is still being made, but it exists almost entirely out of the realm of the charts: for all its ground-breaking brilliance, there have been few takers among the mainstream record-buyers for the new, deliberately abstruse, genre of "grime".
  • (7) I think the most abstruse one we've put in here is ferkidoodle."
  • (8) The lawyer among them, the ever resourceful Markus C Kerber, probably came up with the abstruse idea of supporting their case by quoting the right to resistance.
  • (9) Filesharing tools have gone from the primitive, easily monitored and abstruse (IRC or the early Napster) to a very easy, attack-resistant architecture that was built in response to entertainment industry attacks.
  • (10) Or perhaps it's just a load of bumwash with wilfully abstruse bells on.
  • (11) In a less abstruse way, Twitter has already shown itself to be a useful conduit for circumventing legal or governmental censorship.
  • (12) The origins of this type of aberrant maternal behavior remain abstruse, as do the long-term psychological effects on the child victims.
  • (13) Shenouda's hundred books and countless sermons untangled abstruse dogma in a straightforward way.
  • (14) If it sounds a little abstruse, by the way, to try to solve the feminist framing of the ancient Greeks, the idea of a sex strike has reappeared more recently, in fiction if not in fact.
  • (15) For the lay person attempting to referee the row, and having to interpret such abstruse concepts as the Gini coefficient and, as Gaffney neatly summarises, whether "the r > g inequality is amplifying the reconcentration trend", illumination is hard to discern.
  • (16) For children about to undergo surgery and for their families, anxiety caused by the abstruse procedure and the child's separation can provoke a crisis.
  • (17) Whereas the effects of Fadenoperation on adduction incomitance are perfectly clear, those on the deviation in primary position still remain very abstruse.
  • (18) This manuscript is concerned with concepts rather than abstruse details or mathematics.
  • (19) Model theory is a branch of mathematics that treats such abstruse questions as "is there another number system, different from 0,1,2, ... that satisfies all the axioms of arithmetic?"

Comprehend


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To take in or include by construction or implication; to comprise; to imply.
  • (v. t.) To contain; to embrace; to include; as, the states comprehended in the Austrian Empire.
  • (v. t.) To take into the mind; to grasp with the understanding; to apprehend the meaning of; to understand.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) 66% of the women did not comprehend how lactation performance could decrease.
  • (2) As clinicians comprehend more fully the multifaceted areas of resistance to treatment, they will be able to help their eating-disordered patients traverse a therapeutic impasse.
  • (3) Guillermo Diaz-Pulido, a Griffith University associate professor, said the research was “a major step forward in understanding how seaweeds can harm corals and has important implications for comprehending the consequences of increased carbon dioxide emissions on the health of the Great Barrier Reef”.
  • (4) What the world is seeing now is what we already knew.” Recent events are difficult to comprehend, Ms Karunatilake said, and left her questioning faith and hope.
  • (5) The Jewish writer and theologian Arthur Cohen wrote of the Shoah in terms of what he called the Tremendum, something so completely impossible to comprehend, yet so essential that we (all) try.
  • (6) In each of these cases both the chiropractic practitioner and the emergency room physician failed to comprehend the nature of the problem and take appropriate action.
  • (7) Calculation of structural features of drugs and modeling of biomacromolecules by means of 3D-computer graphics afford a new approach to comprehend a molecular interaction which is important for drug action.
  • (8) Environmental samplings on the ward, comprehending 246 contact cultures, resulted in the isolation of C. difficile from 25 plates (10.1%).
  • (9) Comprehending the nature of this property which couples ionic fluxions into mentality is the quintessential problem of science.
  • (10) Much of the frustration among the UPC members seems to be inspired by a distant authority making a decision about a conflict it couldn't, in their view, possibly comprehend.
  • (11) She said: “We struggle to comprehend the warped and twisted mind that sees a room packed with young children not as a scene to cherish but an opportunity for carnage.
  • (12) "We find it difficult to comprehend James Murdoch's lack of action, given his responsibility as chairman."
  • (13) The target materials consisted of sentence puzzles that were difficult to comprehend in the absence of a key word or phrase.
  • (14) It is difficult to comprehend the logic of expecting improvements in this agenda while withdrawing half a billion dollars in funding to many service agencies, and leaving them poised precariously at the mercy of a clumsy and poorly executed “advancement” strategy.
  • (15) To comprehend speech in most environments, listeners must combine some but not all sounds from across a wide range of frequencies.
  • (16) Regarding the onset near that age period of capacity to use and comprehend the relational nature of opposition, supporting evidence derives from experimental data on the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift.
  • (17) If we then accept our limitations on the precision and order with which we can comprehend it, the understanding of borderline might be supplemented by seeing it in terms of the subjective experience of an integrated self.
  • (18) Normal and language-impaired subjects did not differ in their ability to infer a connection between the novel word and referent, to comprehend the novel word after a single exposure, and to recall some nonlinguistic information associated with the referent.
  • (19) The usefulness of functional studies in order better to comprehend the anatomical substrates of PA and their prognostic value are briefly discussed.
  • (20) All 12-and 14-month-old children comprehended the pointing to a nearby object and most of them also understood the pointing to a distant object.