What's the difference between agony and throe?

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.

Throe


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To put in agony.
  • (n.) Extreme pain; violent pang; anguish; agony; especially, one of the pangs of travail in childbirth, or purturition.
  • (n.) A tool for splitting wood into shingles; a frow.
  • (v. i.) To struggle in extreme pain; to be in agony; to agonize.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The breathtaking response of the geosphere as the great ice sheets crumbled might be considered as providing little more than an intriguing insight into the prehistoric workings of our world, were it not for the fact that our planet is once again in the throes an extraordinary climatic transformation – this time brought about by human activities.
  • (2) And then in the final throes, more than enough incident for a whole game!
  • (3) Now, after 30 years of direct funding by government grant, with little scrutiny, it is in the throes of the rudest of awakenings, from leaks about zero-rated programmes to critics who say it had too much money.
  • (4) Gordimer won the Booker Prize in 1974 for The Conservationist, a novel about a white South African who loses everything, and the Nobel Prize in 1991, when apartheid was in its death throes.
  • (5) The quarter-on-quarter leap in lending is the biggest since 2007, when the housing market boom was in its final throes.
  • (6) NYSE Euronext, which runs the New York Stock exchange and the London futures exchange and is itself in the throes of being taken over by a rival, is setting up a new London-based subsidiary to run Libor.
  • (7) Commentators have been queuing up to analyse the death throes of the paid-for printed news model.
  • (8) Yes, during its death throes, our sun will swell, boiling the oceans and turning the ice caps to steam.
  • (9) As described by Bloomberg, the US is in the throes of a major shift in energy production.
  • (10) Developed and developing countries are in the throes of environmental crisis.
  • (11) What the family could not entirely grasp on that day was that Mississippi was in the throes of a new statewide campaign of cross-burnings and violence organised by the Klan to protest at the start of investigations by Congress into civil rights abuses.
  • (12) Indeed, many would argue that Turkey was already in the throes of a slow motion coup d’état, not by the military but by Erdoğan himself.
  • (13) It seems such an awfully long time ago now, the Preston and Chantelle romance, long enough ago anyway that Big Brother was still a cultural force, or, at least, still watched by significant numbers of people, and not in the awful embarrassing death throes it's currently experiencing nightly on Channel 4.
  • (14) It is now in the throes of a contest between two candidates whose personal and professional backgrounds seem to illustrate the fault lines in current policy debate.
  • (15) Mickey is a guy who clearly can't cut it as an assassin or anything else: a depressive, an alcoholic, a person who we encounter in the virtual death throes of his professional and personal existence.
  • (16) Updated at 3.00pm BST 1.16pm BST More from Turkey Constanze Letsch has sent this from Istanbul: Fehim Tastekin writes in the daily Radikal: "It is natural that many smile that the UU received the prize at a time when it seems in its death throes.
  • (17) Austin is in the throes of a multi-pronged crisis within his command.
  • (18) Tsipras has persistently surprised and out-manoeuvred his opposite numbers, but without securing any net gains for a country in the throes of financial collapse.
  • (19) For a country in the throes of separatism, the World Cup is providing almost a surreal glue of unity.
  • (20) The question of how Australia ought to respond to Indochinese refugees had been hotly debated between April and August 1975 but had been overshadowed by the death throes of the Whitlam government.