What's the difference between avaricious and rapacious?

Avaricious


Definition:

  • (a.) Actuated by avarice; greedy of gain; immoderately desirous of accumulating property.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Leaving is a given when you're dealing with very greedy people; they are avaricious.
  • (2) The Telegraph's religion editor and Church of England priest George Pitcher has described him as personifying "the new amorality of avaricious, red-top, vulgar New Britain".
  • (3) Salmon notes that fossil fuel investment has not provided attractive returns relative to the market over a variety of periods and highlights this as evidence that the sector is not necessarily a home for “avaricious” investors.
  • (4) (But let's not be precious: the author has a very acute ear for that self-regarding, caustic showbizzery, and the chimp is full of apercus such as: "She was an absolute brick, though, Sylvia, and I just didn't see in her that bloodcurdlingly shallow and avaricious gold-digger everybody tells you she became after Doug's death, when she was briefly and lucratively married to Gable."
  • (5) In cases where there is any doubt, patients should be referred to a psychiatrist, just one of many safeguards that were built into the legislation: a request must be made twice, two weeks apart, to prevent someone in a fit of gloom signing something they might later regret, and the signature has to be witnessed by two people, only one of whom may be a relative, so no two avaricious offspring can shunt mom into her grave.
  • (6) Yet, the stream of films and media that casually endorse the avaricious and the talentless rich, the exploitative and the violent are viewed as entertainment.
  • (7) Hadow puts it more chivalrously: "I see the Arctic as a maiden newly discovered on the social scene, and we're melting away her petticoats, and there are some avaricious types peering underneath, and someone needs to defend her honour."
  • (8) A failed Pacific microstate with an avaricious and unscrupulous leadership – Nauru in the late 1990s reportedly laundered more than US$70bn for the Russian mafia – it was the perfect partner for an Australian refugee dumping exercise.
  • (9) Going back to the millenials, it is not difficult to see they fit into several camps rather than one avaricious mass of people in search of higher pay at all costs.
  • (10) He is no convert to what he calls "naked capitalism", but hopes positive examples of business success will encourage avaricious minds to look for more legitimate routes to wealth.
  • (11) One critic labelled him the "personification of the new amorality of avaricious, red-top, vulgar new Britain".
  • (12) A common belief is that the ever-present threat of malpractice litigation, which hangs over the heads of physicians like the sword of Damocles, is due to avaricious lawyers, unrealistic expectations of patients, and the reckless generosity of juries with other people's money.
  • (13) Fifty Shades of Grey is a silly, avaricious sex fantasy, but there are enough interesting things in the book – it's a long book – that Taylor-Johnson might find a good movie lurking in there too, among descriptions of the hero's penis as a "Christian Grey-flavoured popsicle".
  • (14) So far, however, the gemstones have been more curse than blessing, seducing desperate and avaricious Zimbabweans and foreign mercenaries with horrific consequences.
  • (15) Abacha, who ruled Nigeria for five years after a 1993 coup, is believed to have stolen $4.3bn while in office, placing him among the ranks of Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko as one of Africa’s most avaricious kleptocrats.
  • (16) While not all investors are necessarily avaricious, many invested because they expected more positive financial returns than have been realised.
  • (17) Here’s the inevitable Daily Mail laying into “a motley crew of slippery PR men, Cameron cronies and avaricious bankers, plus a smattering of chancers who feathered their nests by selling UK firms to foreigners” (ie the bosses of BT, BP, Shell and other important advertisers).
  • (18) Montgomery frequently drew protests from reporters at the companies he bought, who portrayed him as an avaricious corporate raider who would place profits before journalistic excellence.
  • (19) The reality is that the Australian government conceived of, devised, designed and implemented a program that enabled very large numbers of inexperienced workers, often engaged by unscrupulous and avaricious employers or head contractors, who were themselves inexperienced in insulation installation – to undertake potentially dangerous work.
  • (20) Leave early – whether for reasons of ill health, burn-out or for being universally denounced as an avaricious, world-blighting menace – and it may prove almost impossible, as the TUC recently noted, for the older worker to find another job.

Rapacious


Definition:

  • (a.) Given to plunder; disposed or accustomed to seize by violence; seizing by force.
  • (a.) Accustomed to seize food; subsisting on prey, or animals seized by violence; as, a tiger is a rapacious animal; a rapacious bird.
  • (a.) Avaricious; grasping; extortionate; also, greedy; ravenous; voracious; as, rapacious usurers; a rapacious appetite.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Another member of her circle, the rapacious slum landlord Peter Rachman, had himself become a symbol of the greed and materialism of the affluent society, adding more spice to the mix.
  • (2) Germany has many people in rented accommodation, but they also have much stronger tenancy laws and a much longer-term and less rapacious investment model.
  • (3) Eighteen years after first dipping its toe in the world of banking, Tesco is launching its first current account on Tuesday, and says it is targeting people fed up with "smoke and mirrors" and "rapacious" bank charges.
  • (4) Miliband offered little new on policy apart from a commitment to improve corporate governance so businesses are allowed to invest for the long term, and allow established shareholders to protect companies from rapacious takeovers.
  • (5) He was the most rapacious empire-builder of the regime, with huge powers over the economy.
  • (6) Capital rich but income poor older people sit in the cold rather than keep themselves warm because they are fearful of releasing equity in a rapacious market or desperately want to pass something on to their families.
  • (7) In the struggle against colonialism and racism, that's what's emerged: that black men are strong, and sexually rapacious but only towards women; homosexuals and white men are weak and feminine.
  • (8) Life for millions of people under the most rapacious and reactionary government in 150 years has diminished.
  • (9) Nor is the state rapacious: if you qualify, two-bedroom apartments in newish public blocks rent for around £150 a month, there are 40 sheltered housing units for the elderly that rent for less than £30 a month, and if you’re old and poor enough, someone will come and shovel your snow away for nothing.
  • (10) This is the standard model of rapacious capitalism, fueled and developed in the tech sector.
  • (11) Yet there are still too many obstacles to the free flow of scientific information, from rapacious publishers to restrictive intellectual property laws and unsympathetic research institutions.
  • (12) But while the brutal and vindictive treatment of Khodorkovsy has rightly sparked indignation abroad it has failed to ignite the same passions at home, where he is seen as a rapacious oligarch and sympathy is in short supply.
  • (13) But there is more to Beverly Hills than rapacious officials and suffering citizens.
  • (14) For Abbott, politics is a vocation, not a springboard for eternal political leadership or financial rapaciousness.
  • (15) This time around, rising house prices are producing the opposite: a feel-bad factor among young adults permanently excluded from buying and furious about rapacious rents, combined with a growing sense of despair among the middle-aged no longer able to move up the fabled property ladder because each rung is financially just too far away from the one before.
  • (16) Particular ire has been directed at Flowers because he worked for the Co-op, especially by those who still delude themselves that it lives up to its name as an ethical bank, despite recent events that have seen it fall into the hands of hedge funds and other such rapacious institutions.
  • (17) Norway exports its gathered knowledge about oil production to all parts of the world, including advising foreign governments how to secure the best deals from the hard-headed executives of rapacious oil companies.
  • (18) England had become a nation of penalty-missers, contract-outers, public-school twits and twats, bigots and Bullingdon club bullies, snarling bulldogs and rapacious bankers.A country in which even Labour leaders preached deregulation, prized unfettered wealth and puckered up to the world’s media magnates.
  • (19) If social rents are cheaper than market rents, maybe, just maybe, it’s not because social rent is subsidised – a lie debunked over and over again – but because private markets are rapacious and volatile, and will happily spew out the poor after making as much profit as possible.
  • (20) It treats them not as hopeless victims to be pitied with charity, nor as sources of potential value for a rapacious financial sector, but rather as human beings with an innate right to the wealth that we draw from our planet’s common resources.