What's the difference between adrift and afloat?

Adrift


Definition:

  • (adv. & a.) Floating at random; in a drifting condition; at the mercy of wind and waves. Also fig.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Vauxhall Tower Like a cigarette stubbed out by the Thames, the Vauxhall's lonely stump looks cast adrift, a piece of Pudong that's lost its way.
  • (2) Cardiff are currently six points adrift of Premier League safety, lying 19th ahead of Saturday's trip to Southampton with just five games left.
  • (3) The right has certainly cast adrift parents who wish not to use third-party care for their children, and it is becoming a revolutionary (and firmly feminist) concept to imagine that equality is not only achieved via full participation in the paid workplace.
  • (4) They were two goals behind after 13 minutes at Stamford Bridge and three adrift after 22 at the Etihad Stadium.
  • (5) I was angry when I saw it because I’m working hard, as are other Labour MPs and activists around the country, trying to get a Labour government back in six months’ time, and she set that process back.” David Lammy, the former minister who is hoping to stand as the Labour candidate in the 2016 London mayoral contest, added to the sense of unease in the party when he warned that the party had become “culturally adrift” from its traditional base.
  • (6) Rémi Garde’s side are 10 points adrift of safety and have failed to sign a single player during the window.
  • (7) Drawings meant to show the design of pipelines and a crucial waste storage tank are "misleading", "contradictory" or entirely missing, while in one place a pipe bracket has "come adrift" from a wall.
  • (8) Lewis Nkosi, who has died after a stroke aged 73, once described his fellow writers on South Africa's Drum magazine as "the new Africans, cut adrift from the tribal reserve – urbanised, eager, fast-talking and brash".
  • (9) Updated at 1.22pm GMT 11.55am GMT Could RBS could have been forced into cutting healthy firms adrift, as is alleged, because of the pressure to cut its lending book and recapitalise?
  • (10) Nick Offerman, the comic he-man of Parks and Recreation, stars as Ignatius J Reilly, a gluttonous and concupiscent layabout, slothfully adrift in New Orleans.
  • (11) On Wednesday, his father Ray told the Guardian: “CCHQ’s supposedly impartial investigation, conducted not by an independent person but by a party ‘insider’, was always going to cast Clarke adrift and having done this was going to slam the doors of CCHQ shut and hunker down in an attempt to weather the storm.
  • (12) "By GOD," Hilary gasps in episode one, possibly realising she has signed up for months of sitting in this dusty 90s hellhole with Perfect Peter Jones and know-it-all Theo having to entertain a dismal tribe of jabberers, snake-oil salesmen, "mumpreneurs" and emotionally adrift dreamers who researchers found in mid-afternoon Wetherspoons.
  • (13) Gomez, who turned 18 last month, impressed in his first league campaign at The Valley and joins James Milner, Danny Ings and Adam Bogdan on the list of players to have signed with Brendan Rodgers’ team since last season, when they finished sixth, eight points adrift of the Champions League places.
  • (14) But there's a high risk he'll be cheated, adrift in a virtually unregulated, uninspected world of work.
  • (15) Villa have now gone a club-record 15 league games without a win, they remain eight points adrift of safety, and Rémi Garde could be forgiven for privately wishing that Arsène Wenger, his mentor, had talked him out of, and not into, this thankless job.
  • (16) But now they're still floating up there, adrift, separate from the people: but everybody's getting poorer."
  • (17) AOL has now been cut adrift, but not before Time Warner bled content and money all over the web.
  • (18) He thinks Britain's foreign policy-making is superficial and ill-informed – overly dependent on a loyalty to ­America, yet adrift from what the Obama administration wants.
  • (19) The 3-1 defeat at home to Southampton was Chelsea’s fourth loss in the Premier League this season and leaves them 10 points adrift of Manchester City at the top.
  • (20) Carson Cowles, who identified himself as Roof’s uncle, told Reuters that Roof’s father had recently given him a .45-caliber handgun as a birthday present and that Roof had seemed adrift.

Afloat


Definition:

  • (adv. & a.) Borne on the water; floating; on board ship.
  • (adv. & a.) Moving; passing from place to place; in general circulation; as, a rumor is afloat.
  • (adv. & a.) Unfixed; moving without guide or control; adrift; as, our affairs are all afloat.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) But still she has struggled to keep the business afloat, charging monthly fees of between 1,000 and 1,300 yuan depending on the level of care needed.
  • (2) The EU, ECB and IMF, the troika of bodies keeping the debt-stricken Greek economy afloat, have signalled in no uncertain terms that they want some €8bn of the nearly €12bn package to come from pension and pay cuts, arguing that this will be the fastest way to get the best results.
  • (3) Each student brings £4,000 of funding, which keeps the college afloat.
  • (4) Never mind Tory spending cuts; they would be dwarfed by the SNP cuts necessary to keep the Scottish economy afloat in the radically altered market conditions we now face.” But despite “that rational evisceration of the SNP’s economic policies”, polls showed support for the SNP was now higher than at the time of the referendum.
  • (5) From time to time I'd bump into Amy she had good banter so we could chat a bit and have a laugh, she was a character but that world was riddled with half-cut, doped-up chancers, I was one of them, even in early recovery I was kept afloat only by clinging to the bodies of strangers so Winehouse, but for her gentle quirks didn't especially register.
  • (6) Franklin returned the Sony Reader, for ebooks, he was given by Random House, preferring to read submissions on paper, and while he thinks Apple and its competitors will "probably conquer the world eventually", for the moment he is more worried about how to keep bookshops afloat.
  • (7) Most British shipping companies maintain comprehensive medical services both ashore and afloat which are concerned with not only treatment but also preventive medicine.
  • (8) She shares her conflicted instincts, the personal frustration, the gritted teeth effort to stay afloat when the team was coming apart ... a declaration a lot of women will recognise: “I felt I could hold things together.” The eventual decision that the show could no longer stay afloat.
  • (9) Kenton's alliance with Zaleshoff isn't always an easy one - the journalist is unimpressed by the spy's attempt to fob him off with the official Stalinist line on Trotskyite subversion, for example, and Zaleshoff is, not unreasonably, suspicious of Kenton's motives for helping him - but it's kept afloat by the undercurrent of sexual attraction between Kenton and Zaleshoff's sister.
  • (10) This will be a damaging blow to many local shops who are struggling to stay afloat.
  • (11) These figures illustrate how millions of people are treading water, struggling to keep afloat and afford the very basics.
  • (12) The low cost of a base in Hull should help him and the colleagues he sub-contracts to keep afloat, along with a working wife – although the voluntary sector resource centre she runs is also under severe financial pressure – and children in their twenties who have left home and got jobs.
  • (13) "The UK deficit is the result of vital government action to keep the economy afloat and prevent the levels of unemployment, business closures and repossessions seen in previous recessions."
  • (14) With European taxpayers already irate that Greece will need yet more funds to keep afloat, the €130bn financial support load had previously been seen as a red line across which no EU government was willing to step.
  • (15) "Now the government is making the political choice to cut public services that will hit the poorest hardest rather than force the banks to change how they operate and repay those who kept them afloat."
  • (16) Aides close to Tsipras insisted that Athens had little desire to “seek enemies abroad” but the leftist leader had a duty to disclose the details of last month’s dramatic negotiations with creditors to keep the bankrupt country afloat.
  • (17) In the future being adaptable, able to learn how to learn, rather than learn how to remember, will be the only way of staying afloat in a swirling labour market.
  • (18) "It is food that is aimed for the thousands of Greek families blighted by the genocidal policies of the memorandum," said the party, referring to the loan agreement Athens has signed with international creditors to keep the debt-crippled country afloat.
  • (19) Map Greece has spent roughly €280m (£215m) handling the refugee crisis since the start of 2015 – money the debt-stricken country, dependent on emergency bailout loans to keep afloat, has struggled to find.
  • (20) The onerous terms of the deeply unpopular “memoranda”, agreed with foreign lenders to keep insolvent Greece afloat, would be overturned.

Words possibly related to "afloat"