What's the difference between amusing and whimsical?

Amusing


Definition:

  • (p. pr. & vb. n.) of Amuse
  • (a.) Giving amusement; diverting; as, an amusing story.

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?

Whimsical


Definition:

  • (a.) Full of, or characterized by, whims; actuated by a whim; having peculiar notions; queer; strange; freakish.
  • (a.) Odd or fantastic in appearance; quaintly devised; fantastic.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Although he could be lovable, charming, whimsical, encouraging, and deeply devoted to his family, he subjugated the adult women in his household and at least one son to exploitation and abuse, demanding (and receiving from his wife and step-daughter) almost total abnegation of self.
  • (2) Photograph: Rachel King Doing a whimsical self-promotional piece for a weekend culture supplement We would never joke about doing a whimsical self-promotional piece for a weekend culture supplement.
  • (3) Here, it’s easy to make yourself comfortable in the sweet, slightly whimsical bedrooms that open onto a serene, tree-filled courtyard.
  • (4) There's still touches of the old, more whimsical comedian, though, not to mention a one-woman play about the Mitford sisters' love for sexy Nazis.
  • (5) The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies First up is the debut teaser for The Hobbit: The Battle of The Five Armies, the final instalment in Peter Jackson's epic three-part adaptation of JRR Tolkien 's whimsical fantasy fable.
  • (6) But with the support of Tony Whitby, the controller of Radio 4, Bob Robinson played a significant and influential part in accelerating Today's transformation from a whimsical magazine into a news and current affairs programme.
  • (7) A great read, and a delightful puzzle, but as the contradictory and whimsical interpretations of the rabbis show, hardly a reliable basis for justifying real-world land grabs.
  • (8) Find out about the great films they’re showing ...” On Monday, as Fox and Leadsom painted a vision of UK trade slightly more lo-tech and whimsical than the chocolate biscuit mill in Bagpuss, Corbyn’s only media comment was a tweet: “@LabourFilmFest is coming to the North West for the 1st time.
  • (9) More whimsical stuff for county blog regulars here in the north-east, where Darren Pattinson has been the central figure of the morning session.
  • (10) Trundling on a cheesy tourist trail around the Italian capital (the Trevi fountain, the Spanish Steps), it tells four whimsical stories that never intersect, meaning that its most watchable stars – Alec Baldwin, Penélope Cruz, Roberto Benigni and Allen, appearing in one of his movies for the first time since Scoop, in 2006 – never interact.
  • (11) In between, he has offered whimsical, slightly vaudevillian comic sagas of sex and drugs in Notting Hill (then a bohemian enclave of high hippydom) with titles such as The Saga of Peaches Melba and the Hash Officer, and Hector the Dope-Sniffing Hound .
  • (12) This highly energetic picture isn't for everyone – but if you like your whimsical magical realism done up in an antic, extra-crafty style, this may just win your heart.
  • (13) It limits evaluation to mere tendencies, formulated in such vague terms as "complete remission," "partial remission," and "treatment failure," in a disease whose natural history is sometimes so whimsical that the same clinical case, over a period of years, can be both a success and a failure of the same treatment.
  • (14) He was himself an artist in his spare time, and his whimsical creations included a man with three penises (Portnoy's Triple Complaint) carved from a tree trunk.
  • (15) He converted whatever his feelings were into the whimsical, quasi-romantic banter that eventually made its way into the Alice books.
  • (16) I still have mine at home.” Ranieri’s simulated alarm call was no less whimsical to Italian ears three decades ago than it is to English ones today.
  • (17) This article presents a whimsical overview of how a father can participate in this most important relationship through supporting and assisting the mother and developing comforting skills for the infant.
  • (18) The north-south divide always brings out the whimsical Tolkien in southerners.
  • (19) He goes after its baffling, mellifluous names – Smintheus, Agyieus, Platanistius, Theoxenius – his pencil languidly scratches, in a whimsical mock-invocation of Apollo from 1975.
  • (20) Music has always been the principal inspiration for Morris's work, and the variety in this season is reflected at one extreme by A Wooden Tree, Morris's response to the whimsical fantasy of Scottish poet Ivor Cutler, and Socrates, his marvellously poetic dialogue with the austere music of Eric Satie's score.