What's the difference between agony and despair?

Agony


Definition:

  • (n.) Violent contest or striving.
  • (n.) Pain so extreme as to cause writhing or contortions of the body, similar to those made in the athletic contests in Greece; and hence, extreme pain of mind or body; anguish; paroxysm of grief; specifically, the sufferings of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane.
  • (n.) Paroxysm of joy; keen emotion.
  • (n.) The last struggle of life; death struggle.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "The new feminine ideal is of egg-smooth perfection from hairline to toes," she writes, describing the exquisite agony of having her fingers, arms, back, buttocks and nostrils waxed.
  • (2) It has been awfully hard-won, carved slowly out of a big block of human agony.
  • (3) Her agony and her rapture stay interior, and they flip-flop like nerves in this beautiful, grave black-and-white movie.
  • (4) Those who remember the Two Davids of the 1987 SDP-Liberal Alliance will recall the exquisite agony only too well, cruelly captured by the Spitting Image puppet of little Steel perched in big Owen's pocket.
  • (5) Using male and female Wistar rats, pituitary response to cardiac and respiratory failure type (CFT and RFT) sudden death caused by the intravenous administration of KC1 and SCC, respectively, was examined by analyzing variation in pituitary immunoreactive beta-endorphin (IR-beta-EP) levels determined by radioimmunoassay after death and in circulating IR-beta-EP levels during periods of agony.
  • (6) I was in the surgical ward at Westmorland General Hospital on Kendal Green, and it was agony.
  • (7) I'd go after work and he'd paint till 1 or 1.30 in the morning, and it was agony lying there on the floor.
  • (8) Evidently fuelled by the agony of losing a series twelve months ago when the trophy was almost within their grasp, they also had the teamwork, technique and experience to turn their quest for revenge into a reality.
  • (9) Facebook Twitter Pinterest Even those who’ve never seen a downhill ski race couldn’t help but sympathise with Bode Miller’s agony at missing out on a medal in what will surely be the last Olympic event of his career.
  • (10) "When the disaster was big enough," King writes, "agony and violent death had an enriching quality."
  • (11) Even at UCH, when no one was there for us and my father, having not slept for almost 30 hours, was pulling his hair out in agony, I tried to look at it all as a kind of comedy of errors."
  • (12) They were subject, of course, to the prison censor, but the agony over Winnie, and the passion of which that agony was a product, blazes through them.
  • (13) That he ended up in the dock in The Hague at all surprised many who have studied the man and his country's agony through the 1990s.
  • (14) Shawcross, however, maintains there was no bad intent and said for that reason he has not been tormenting himself about the moment he collided with Ramsey's right leg and left the teenager writhing in agony.
  • (15) He notes the uneven agony - 80% will land in developing countries.
  • (16) The poor animals are thrown back into the water to die in agony, a practice condemned by environmental campaigners.
  • (17) The rest was pure agony for the Australians, give or take a yellow card for Sonny Bill Williams, given for a dangerous tackle.
  • (18) The woman before you in agony pushing and pushing, losing all dignity, does not care one bit whether I am feeling alarmed at her screaming, worried about where I should be standing, wondering whether I should rub her back or try and make small talk between contractions.
  • (19) Litvinenko sipped “three or four times” from a cup of radioactive tea, and died in agony 23 days later, the inquiry heard last week.
  • (20) Our most excruciating agony is of not being noticed in the world.

Despair


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To be hopeless; to have no hope; to give up all hope or expectation; -- often with of.
  • (v. t.) To give up as beyond hope or expectation; to despair of.
  • (v. t.) To cause to despair.
  • (n.) Loss of hope; utter hopelessness; complete despondency.
  • (n.) That which is despaired of.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Crushing their dream of denying healthcare to millions of people will put them on that road to despair.
  • (2) It was the ease with which minor debt could slide into a tangle of hunger and despair.
  • (3) The behavioural despair test is a good complement for screening except for drugs having a beta-agonist activity, it appears that this test is dependent on functional relationships between alpha 2 and serotonergic systems.
  • (4) It became his task to use his literary art in an opposite way to Hesse, even though he despaired of what literature might achieve or of the capacity of rich Europeans to change.
  • (5) He has his job to do and he has to do it the way he thinks best.” On Saturday night, in a sign of the growing concern at the top of the party about the affair, one shadow cabinet member told the Observer : “The issue is already echoing back at us on the doorsteps.” At all levels, there was despair that the furore had turned the spotlight on to Labour’s difficulties as a time when the party had hoped to take advantage of the Tories’ second byelection loss at the hands of Ukip.
  • (6) Many have been driven to a suicidal despair that only those devoid of human empathy can fail to understand.
  • (7) In recent weeks a number of suicides apparently linked to financial despair have hit the headlines.
  • (8) "You can get six, seven or eight calls a day, which would add to anyone's despair and depression.
  • (9) Thus in your own words you have said why it was utterly inappropriate for you to use the platform of a Pac hearing in this way.” He suggested that many professionals were “in despair at the lack of understanding and cheap haranguing which characterise your manner” after a series of hearings at which Hodge has led fierce interrogations of senior business figures and others.
  • (10) For Foos, arousal often competed with despair and sadness at what he witnessed.
  • (11) | Hugh Muir Read more Wherever Labour people gather to discuss how to break out of the vice tightening around the party, answers fail amid sighs of utter despair.
  • (12) The presumed interrelation between early rearing conditions and the neurobiological status of the infant that might lead to increased risk for despair is not understood.
  • (13) Erik Erikson used the film character of Dr. Borg from Wild Strawberries to flesh out his life cycle conception of ego integrity versus despair in old age.
  • (14) But the character – compounded of piercing sanity and existential despair, infinite hesitation and impulsive action, self-laceration and observant irony – is so multi-faceted, it is bound to coincide at some point with an actor’s particular gifts.
  • (15) He is an innately optimistic character as well as a clever one, and a man who needs to persuade his party not to despair.
  • (16) The present report deals with the effects of CBZ on two animal models of depression, namely the potentiation of amphetamine-induced anorexia, and the behavioral despair model.
  • (17) That is the secret of his repetitive name (like Nabokov's criminal hero in his novel Despair: Hermann Hermann, a misprint for Mr Man Mr Man).
  • (18) On the one hand, he genuinely sees himself as the great liberator of the poor, the man who wept at Britain’s modern-day penury on Glasgow’s Easterhouse estate; on the other, he is the champion of policies that have driven some of the poorest people in society into despair.
  • (19) Ovariectomy changed the swimming time course and increased the rhythmical index of depression without other serious disturbances of the behavioural "despair" test.
  • (20) I wanted to rediscover my joy in writing, I wanted to leave behind the heaviness and despair of Dead Europe .