What's the difference between abyss and precipice?

Abyss


Definition:

  • (n.) A bottomless or unfathomed depth, gulf, or chasm; hence, any deep, immeasurable, and, specifically, hell, or the bottomless pit.
  • (n.) Infinite time; a vast intellectual or moral depth.
  • (n.) The center of an escutcheon.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Berlin said it was not too late to turn back from the abyss, without proposing any decisions or action.
  • (2) The worldwide pattern of movement of DDT residues appears to be from the land through the atmosphere into the oceans and into the oceanic abyss.
  • (3) Updated at 7.42pm BST 7.19pm BST Summary Here's a summary of Obama's statement and Q&A: President Obama said that to avoid 'the abyss', Iraq must form a new, inclusive government.
  • (4) On Friday 10 June, five men charged with keeping Britain in the European Union gathered in a tiny, windowless office and stared into the abyss.
  • (5) One path, to be honest, leads to an economical abyss.
  • (6) Until May there had been hopes that Winehouse might have been finding her way back from the abyss.
  • (7) He also imagined himself sitting on a grassy knoll in Poland, a country he had never visited, surrounded by rolling hills as dawn broke over the roof of the world on 26 May to reveal not a bucolic scene but the reality of his position – perched over a white abyss.
  • (8) The Bethnal Green schoolgirls, however, appeared to vanish into the abyss after they landed in Turkey, never starring in propaganda videos or demonstrating what they were doing there.
  • (9) However, it is also home to pressure-preferring or barophilic bacteria, believed to be functionally dominant over shallow-water intruders at abyssal depths.
  • (10) He accused the Ukrainian authorities who took over after the fall of president Viktor Yanukovych of driving the country to the abyss.
  • (11) Nigeria has been poised over an abyss for a long time.
  • (12) Season two crafted complex characters racked with existential ambivalence – heroines marked for the abyss, fragile, flammable outcasts and desolate prodigies, all of whose private pain was as palpable as the crimson bloodbath head witch Evelyn Poole soaks in.
  • (13) After millennia of crossing the oceans in ignorance of what lies beneath, there is no longer any part of the abyss beyond our reach if we can find the will to go there.
  • (14) The question for those Labour MPs and others who can see where all this is leading, and want to stop Labour heading over the abyss, is what to do about it and when.
  • (15) Europe took a small step back from the moral abyss today, but it needs to do much more to provide clarity and turn this momentum into lives saved at sea.” The summit was called at short notice in reaction to the deaths of an estimated 800 migrants off the coast of Libya last weekend, drowned when their fishing trawler capsized in the biggest single tragedy in two years of attempts to flee sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East for southern Europe .
  • (16) "There was also no place that was covering music in the way that if you follow sports you go to ESPN, or like CNN with news, but with music you were just thrown into the abyss.
  • (17) "There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over" ... "Amen" from the crowd, " ... and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair ... " " Yes, Lord."
  • (18) Methanopyrus kandleri is a novel abyssal methanogenic archaebacterium growing at 110 degrees C on H2 and CO2.
  • (19) When exhausted European leaders emerged from all-night negotiations in Brussels last month with a "comprehensive" plan to claw the euro back from the abyss, they could have had no inkling that, less than a fortnight later, it would have so comprehensively collapsed.
  • (20) Putin said Kiev was pulling the country into an “abyss”.

Precipice


Definition:

  • (n.) A sudden or headlong fall.
  • (n.) A headlong steep; a very steep, perpendicular, or overhanging place; an abrupt declivity; a cliff.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) On Sunday Assange said: "Will it [the US] return to and reaffirm the revolutionary values it was founded on, or will it lurch off the precipice, dragging us all into a dangerous and oppressive world?"
  • (2) In a day of unremitting gloom, and yet more market turbulence, the Greek government also stood on the precipice of collapse, risking an uncontrolled default, as the government of George Papandreou faced a late-night confidence vote in parliament.
  • (3) They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us."
  • (4) "We may not be looking over the precipice as we were last autumn, but what we are likely to see is a long, slow reduction in the standard of living in this country.
  • (5) If parties want to try – and I believe they do want to move to a de-escalation – I think there are sets of choices that are available,” he said, expressing hope that “we can seize this moment and pull back from the precipice”.
  • (6) In a canyon between grey shattered precipices of bomb-ravaged buildings, an uncountable number of people wait for food.
  • (7) Filled with classic British gangster-movie iconography – hard London faces hung upside-down from meathooks, the stock-car pile-up – The Long Good Friday is also a grownup, despairing look at Britain on the edge of an economic and political precipice.
  • (8) Peg Johnston, the owner, finds herself facing this precipice every year.
  • (9) However, while a government shutdown is off the table, the spectre of the kind of political brinkmanship that took the US to the precipice of an economic crisis in October has not been entirely averted.
  • (10) As its population ages, China is racing toward a “demographic precipice,” says Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Irvine.
  • (11) "But it's at a precipice where it needs to jump to the next level of evolution."
  • (12) There is a palpable feeling in the country that the ruling junta has run out of ground, teetering on the precipice and threatening to take the country with it.
  • (13) But by voting, First Nations can return their communities from the precipice.
  • (14) For Abbott, on the precipice of fulfilling his destiny in politics, it would have seemed like collegiality, not outright soul-selling, to become a man for Peta and for Brian down in party headquarters, a man for the colleagues, a man for the Liberal party base, a man for Rupert and for Alan Jones and for Ray Hadley (when Scott Morrison wasn’t available) – a man who would validate the various irrationalisms of the wireless ranters and the white male columnists in Rupert’s employ – young and older fogeys who cherish past certainties, and who feel just as ambivalent about the future as Abbott himself feels.
  • (15) IFS inequality chart IFS warns of biggest squeeze on pay for 70 years over Brexit Read more “These troubling forecasts show millions of families across the country are teetering on a precipice, with 400,000 pensioners and over one million more children likely to fall into poverty and suffer the very real and awful consequences that brings if things do not change.
  • (16) With the NFL’s first openly gay player about to join the workplace environment, the League stands on the precipice of a new era, where a culture of respect won’t just be promoted, but will be strictly enforced.
  • (17) More generally, relations with the US and Europe spiralled, with the values gap ever bigger and the rhetoric on both sides ever more spiky, while still refraining from going entirely over the precipice.
  • (18) The prospect of protracted political instability has stoked fears that Greece is not just teetering on a political precipice but also laying the ground, however unwittingly, for its own euro exit.
  • (19) This time, people saw they were at the edge of a precipice and they reacted.” He said of his absolute majority in parliament elections this week , that cemented the collapse of the decades-old traditional French parties, as well as being seen abroad as holding back populism: “My election, and my majority in parliament are not the end of something: they are a challenging beginning.
  • (20) Since neither the men nor the animals could be sure of their footing on account of the snow, any who stepped wide of the path or stumbled, overbalanced and fell down the precipices.” At length they reached a spot where the path suddenly seemed impassable, as Livy describes it: “A narrow cliff falling away so sheer that even a light-armed soldier could hardly have got down it by feeling his way and clinging to such bushes and stumps as presented themselves.” “The track was too narrow for the elephants or even the pack animals to pass,” writes Polybius.