What's the difference between amusement and astonishment?

Amusement


Definition:

  • (n.) Deep thought; muse.
  • (n.) The state of being amused; pleasurable excitement; that which amuses; diversion.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It was amusing: he's still working away and this picture of him is hanging in a gallery somewhere.
  • (2) Joaquin Rodriguez Oliver is amusing himself by trying to take a puff of a cigar in his saddle.
  • (3) Students have been amused by the amount of public response to this action.
  • (4) But she is determined to reassert her authority and appears not to have been amused by the remark.
  • (5) In La Shish, the beloved local halal restaurant where Wanda Beydoun has worked a minimum wage managing job for 16 years, these stereotypes are a source of amusement.
  • (6) In a tent for those recovering, a talkative man wearing a heavy gold chain played up to amused doctors during the lunch break.
  • (7) Israeli media reports said the rocket came down near an amusement park in sand dunes on the edge of the city.
  • (8) He tells an amusing story of how exhilarated, if stunned, he was by completing three skeleton runs at Lillehammer.
  • (9) Tech entrepreneurs will keep expanding into increasingly diverse niches, so it will be amusing to try and pick out the most obscure market being disrupted in 2014.
  • (10) King notes with some amusement that he has been around so long that kids who read and loved him in the 1970s now run publishing houses and newspapers; he is revered, these days, as a grand old man of American letters.
  • (11) She added that the superstore would have pulled business from the local high street and brought big lorries and heavy traffic to the site which sits next to Dreamland, Margate’s derelict amusement park which is being revived.
  • (12) But my amusement should be a problem for movement conservatism.
  • (13) Facebook Twitter Pinterest We are most amused … The Windsors, starring Harry Enfield and Hadyn Gwynne, centre.
  • (14) In Brussels, the reaction was more bemusement than amusement.
  • (15) It’s something that has always baffled and amused me about my grandmother.
  • (16) It amuses me that he calls his new material "songs" when they are so unsingable.
  • (17) The joke, the uncontainable amusement, the gleeful satisfaction, was that most rational people had thought that he was too disabled to walk 26 miles, that he was too sick.
  • (18) The tribunal ruled: "The comment having been made, other people in the room, including other supervisors, laughing and finding it amusing, was inevitably conduct that any gay police officer would reasonably consider … degrading."
  • (19) "The part in the film is small, I thought it would be amusing.
  • (20) Now tell us this, Robbie, when you collected your MBE from the queen, did you exchange amusing chitchat with the woman who most of us only ever encounter on stamps?

Astonishment


Definition:

  • (n.) The condition of one who is stunned. Hence: Numbness; loss of sensation; stupor; loss of sense.
  • (n.) Dismay; consternation.
  • (n.) The overpowering emotion excited when something unaccountable, wonderful, or dreadful is presented to the mind; an intense degree of surprise; amazement.
  • (n.) The object causing such an emotion.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It is my desperate hope that we close out of town.” In the book, God publishes his own 'It Getteth Better' video and clarifies his original writings on homosexuality: I remember dictating these lines to Moses; and afterward looking up to find him staring at me in wide-eyed astonishment, and saying, "Thou do knowest that when the Israelites read this, they're going to lose their fucking shit, right?"
  • (2) To a supporter at the last election like me – someone who spoke alongside Nick Clegg at the curtain-raiser event for the party conference during the height of Labour's onslaught on civil liberties, and was assured privately by two leaders that the party was onside about civil liberties – this breach of trust and denial of principle is astonishing.
  • (3) It's that he habitually abuses his position by lobbying ministers at all; I've heard from former ministers who were astonished by the speed with which their first missive from Charles arrived, opening with the phrase: "It really is appalling".
  • (4) Puskas, possessed of a left foot of astonishing power, and his team colleagues, Sandor Kocsis and Zoltan Czibor, all found their way to Spain.
  • (5) Results of venous thrombectomies are particularly astonishingly good in phlegmasia coerulea and it is therefore mandatory to transfer all fresh cases of thrombosis of the deep veins of the peelvis and lower extremities to an angiologic center in order to differentiate cases for fibrinolytic therapy, from those which require surgical intervention.
  • (6) FWA chairman Andy Dunn said: "Those members who have been fortunate enough to be working at a match involving Luis Suárez have witnessed an astonishing talent first-hand.
  • (7) Even Corbyn’s fiercest critics have to concede he has achieved something astonishing.
  • (8) Recently released figures from the Veterans Administration on the number of Vietnam veterans who have been granted service connection in their claims for post-traumatic stress disorder appear to be astonishingly low, given the publicity that the media and mental health professionals have placed on this diagnosis in recent years.
  • (9) It is, in fact, quite astonishing to find British housebuilders and planners going along with the design and construction of such decent new homes.
  • (10) Over the past year, they’ve been to five continents and discovered an astonishing world of insect flavour.
  • (11) "The memorable 1961 British Home Championship yielded an astonishing 40 goals from six matches," writes Erik Kennedy.
  • (12) The complication rate was astonishingly low during IUSC: being only 4.3% (2 male patients, one with stricture of the urethra and epididymitis, one with autonomous dysreflexia with bladder overdistension).
  • (13) He added: “In the context of very surprising populist electoral successes in the US it would be astonishing if the BBC didn’t interview her.
  • (14) So how did Vanity Fair decide to illustrate this heartfelt and rather astonishing interview?
  • (15) Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, said he would be astonished if the coalition had not enacted a lobbyists' register and a power to recall errant MPs by 2015.
  • (16) At one point, Hodge said she was astonished that the secretary of state had claimed that Stephens had approved Smith's role.
  • (17) Individualism – the assertion of every person’s claim to maximised private freedom and the unrestrained liberty to express autonomous desires … became the leftwing watchword of the hour.” The result was an astonishing liberation: from millennia of social, gender and sexual control by powerful, mostly elderly men.
  • (18) She is fantastically clever and when she's on about ideas she is astonishing.
  • (19) The kinetic data obtained using lysine-containing model peptides as substrates indicate an astonishing similarity to mammalian lysyloxidase.
  • (20) "We are a struggling small business and I am astonished that banks are allowed to get away with handling their accounts in this way.