What's the difference between airy and sprightly?

Airy


Definition:

  • (a.) Consisting of air; as, an airy substance; the airy parts of bodies.
  • (a.) Relating or belonging to air; high in air; aerial; as, an airy flight.
  • (a.) Open to a free current of air; exposed to the air; breezy; as, an airy situation.
  • (a.) Resembling air; thin; unsubstantial; not material; airlike.
  • (a.) Relating to the spirit or soul; delicate; graceful; as, airy music.
  • (a.) Without reality; having no solid foundation; empty; trifling; visionary.
  • (a.) Light of heart; vivacious; sprightly; flippant; superficial.
  • (a.) Having an affected manner; being in the habit of putting on airs; affectedly grand.
  • (a.) Having the light and aerial tints true to nature.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) When Philip Roth accepted the biennial International Booker prize honouring some 60 years of his fiction, from Goodbye, Columbus to Nemesis , he sat at a wooden table in the studio adjoining his airy Connecticut retreat looking as much like a retired priest, or judge, as the Grand Old Man of American letters, pushing 79.
  • (2) All of which makes it curious to find the film's stars abruptly reunited in the airy limbo of a Paris hotel, just south of the Arc de Triomphe.
  • (3) It seemed to me watching the film that the concept of the cloud was another great piece of airy obfuscation on the part of the internet corporations, who like to peddle the childlike and the playful in the way that banks used to flog you credit cards called Smile and Egg and Marbles and Goldfish, to encourage you not to think too hard about the small print (what could possibly go wrong?).
  • (4) The airy, whitewashed restaurant is tasteful, but still a local joint.
  • (5) They ranged from the “hmm” to the blatant to the eye-wateringly awful: ‘Hair twirling’ I recall once the suggestion that I ask a question of another team, in a very airy and innocent manner, hair-twirling and all, to try and get a more favourable answer than previously.
  • (6) Snare describes the portrait quite clearly: the young Charles with his large liquid eyes and pale face, appearing in three-quarter view without rigidity or outline, the painting as airy as mist (and the prince too young for Van Dyck, who only portrayed Charles in his 30s).
  • (7) On the inside it is cream coloured, airy and slightly chewy.
  • (8) Perhaps her airy way of describing this vast archive, withheld in breach of the spirit of the Public Record Act of 1958, had something to do with embarrassment.
  • (9) People around, young people in general can see what engineering is and the fact that it is no longer a mucky, oily, grimy place to work but it is a light, airy, clean environment," he said.
  • (10) However, Miliband's airy rhetoric leaves gaping holes for the Tories to fill with their own version of what a Labour government is about: bankrupting the country, ramping up debt, subsidising dissolute scroungers, opening the borders to mass immigration.
  • (11) Today is busy enough, with herds of small people from a vast range of ethnic backgrounds – the area is one of the most diverse in the country – crowding around the fold-out tables in a bright, airy hall just off the reception area.
  • (12) In an airy white blouse, art gallery owner Dasha Zhukova poses serenely on a chair, in a photograph taken for a Russian fashion website.
  • (13) The second, of course, is the voyeuristic pleasure the camera takes in the delicacies: the shot of a spoon plunging through the soft, airy volume of a chocolate souffle, for example.
  • (14) Punk often sneered at "art" as airy-fairy, bourgeois self-indulgence, but its ranks were full of art-school graduates and this artiness blossomed with the sound, design and stage presentation of bands such as Wire and Talking Heads.
  • (15) No more so than in the airy officers of the consultancy firm Marketing Greece.
  • (16) In his airy new office, Cable says his views have evolved, but refuses to sit in the quirky modern chair shipped in by his predecessor, Lord Mandelson.
  • (17) But she struck me as being very airy-fairy, not the kind of crisp and to-the-point person I was after.
  • (18) And it is this that has brought us here today, to Science, the airy central London headquarters of Hirst's art and business empire.
  • (19) He pauses, looking at the assembled Kurds, Iraqis, Libyans, Bosnians, Serbs, Mexicans, Americans and others in front of him, gathered in the airy auditorium of the Peace Palace in The Hague.
  • (20) Thoughtful speeches on rehabilitating recidivists who wreck communities were reduced to jokes about hugging hoodies, while attempts to debate rising levels of depression, inadequate care and family breakdown were mocked as an Old Etonian's airy-fairy talk of happiness.

Sprightly


Definition:

  • (superl.) Sprightlike, or spiritlike; lively; brisk; animated; vigorous; airy; gay; as, a sprightly youth; a sprightly air; a sprightly dance.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The gloom was soon to build when five minutes after the interval Giggs won a corner with a sprightly run.
  • (2) Charles Pooter, a man with a biography, a face, a surname, and even a proper wife and a degree of affection for his none to noteworthy existence, gives a sprightly and daily account of his own life in the form of a diary.
  • (3) Blatter will be a sprightly 94 years old by then, so if you think his judgement's gone now, it'll be very interesting to see what modernist masterpiece he commissions when the task finally needs sorting.
  • (4) Stuck between the cultist Friends of Radio 3 and Global Radio’s sprightly three-times-the-size Classic FM, the network vacillates between populist copying and public service broadcasting stodge.
  • (5) Photograph: Mimi Mollica for the Guardian Antonino Vaccarino, a sprightly, bespectacled 68-year-old, today runs a small cinema in the back streets of town, but once served as mayor before being jailed for five years for mafia membership – on the basis, he claims, of false accusations made by a turncoat.
  • (6) Buffon does not look especially sprightly as he comes for it but manages to punch it to safety.
  • (7) In Aronofsky's film, Crowe takes the title role of the man said to be around 600 at the time of the flood, while Hopkins is Methuselah, who was a sprightly 969.
  • (8) From the outset, Arsenal had been the more sprightly and inventive, and that pattern continued when Cesc Fábregas clipped a dainty ball over the Spurs defence for Nasri to chase.
  • (9) Excerpts from the diary show him to be a liberal-minded man and one fond of the company of young people; and show Betty to be a sprightly young Quakeress, buffeted by emotional conflicts between loyalty to her north-country fiance and her flirtation with young Dr. John Coakley Lettsom.
  • (10) Judy was under five feet tall, a sprightly figure, vivacious and pretty rather than beautiful, her pale skin accentuated by the bright red of her lips in the old three-strip Technicolor.
  • (11) He is a sprightly, bearded Dubliner of 48 who has a plumbing business called Associated Response and wears its uniform every day in the dock, as he is still doing work in the evenings and at weekends.
  • (12) A few weeks later, we meet at a photographic studio in east London: the sun is shining, Radcliffe's cough has gone, and he looks more sprightly than ever.
  • (13) There may be something in that, but many observers believe it has simply been a matter of the sprightly Martial finally persuading a somewhat stubborn manager that it does not make sense to have Rooney as first point of attack any more.
  • (14) National anthems: We all know them by now and Uruguay's remains more lovable - a sprightly number with menacing undertones.
  • (15) With Cameron Jerome well shackled by Daniel Ayala it was the sinuous runs of the sprightly Wes Hoolahan that offered Norwich’s most likely route to an equaliser.
  • (16) Messages with identical content (the same script and visual shot sequence) were made in two forms: child program forms (animated film, second-person address, and character voice narration with sprightly music) and adult program forms (live photography, third-person address, and adult male narration with sedate background music).
  • (17) Begovic had to be more sprightly in the 18th minute to turn away a curling effort from the edge of the area by Willian.
  • (18) I want to swim until I turn 105 if I can live that long,” the sprightly Nagaoka told Kyodo News.
  • (19) For the first time this season, the odd sprightly period of the occasional game aside, José Mourinho witnessed his side impose themselves on a contest, dominate for lengthy periods, and revel in clear superiority.
  • (20) Among most cases, the less sprightly life is dominant around preadolescence, which affects the orientation of psychopathology in adolescence.