What's the difference between belligerent and quarrelsome?

Belligerent


Definition:

  • (p. pr.) Waging war; carrying on war.
  • (p. pr.) Pertaining, or tending, to war; of or relating to belligerents; as, a belligerent tone; belligerent rights.
  • (n.) A nation or state recognized as carrying on war; a person engaged in warfare.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) He could be the target of more punishing wit, as when Michael Foot, noting a tendency to be tougher abroad than at home, called him "a belligerent Bertie Wooster without even a Jeeves to restrain him."
  • (2) Though the exercises have given the US a chance to vent its frustration at what appears to be state-sponsored espionage and theft on an industrial scale, China has been belligerent.
  • (3) As well as George Dyer, there was the murderer Perry Smith in the Truman Capote story Infamous, the hot-headed mobster child-killer in Road To Perdition, the brooding Ted Hughes in Gwyneth Paltrow’s Sylvia biopic and a belligerent Mossad assassin in Steven Spielberg’s Munich.
  • (4) This plays into the widespread belief that Muslims are under attack from a belligerent west and its local proxies.
  • (5) In international affairs he has found the only posture more dangerous than belligerence – incoherence.
  • (6) The belligerence of 7 patients who had suffered an acute brain insult was effectively controlled by propranolol in doses of 60 to 320 mg per day.
  • (7) However, despite the country’s belligerent behaviour in the region and its egregious human rights record, which have long left it isolated, there is an opportunity for engagement given that prominent regime officials have indicated a willingness to reform.
  • (8) Asked about the status of his own job, the press secretary joked “I’m right here”, telling reporters, in a belligerent line that could have been uttered by his impersonator Melissa McCarthy: “You can keep taking your selfies.” The president was busy sowing confusion by trying a new passive-aggressive tone on Twitter , musing: “While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out.
  • (9) Despite the pro-AV leader, Ed Miliband, having stuck his neck out a few times for the yeses, belligerent turns by grumpy old stagers such as John Reid and David Blunkett have created the impression that the people's party has no interest in giving the people more of a say.
  • (10) To avoid this, women in high executive office often assume a corporate persona that overcompensates by being either brittle and defensive, or Thatcher-esque in terms of belligerence.
  • (11) European commission upgrades growth forecast for UK economy Read more Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets UK, said: “The initial belligerence of the Trump administration towards China and Japan appears to have given way to a more practicable way of doing things, and while peace may not have broken out quite yet, some welcome pragmatism does appear to be taking hold in Washington.
  • (12) Mattis pointedly warned North Korea to back off, pledging an “overwhelming” response to any belligerence .
  • (13) Germany's bureaucratic stasis contrasts with a welter of events, official and unofficial, digital, public and private, in the other former belligerent countries.
  • (14) For the highest purpose of a democratic government is to bring a society together and hold it together, not to divide it with fears, with rumours of wars, with acts of belligerence against other and then against its own.
  • (15) But if the odd local blog bristles that us lot should “go back where we came from”, the antipathy to immigrants from farther away ( 8.59% of the local population, according to a recent Oxford University study ; far lower than the 12.5% national average) is much stronger: especially to the eastern Europeans, many of whom have landed in scruffy parts of Cliftonville, where they have belligerently set about opening shops and car washes, and trying to get on with their lives.
  • (16) Five and a half decades of history show us that such belligerence inhibits better judgement.
  • (17) The White House condemned the attack as "belligerent", adding: "The United States is firmly committed to the defence of our ally … and to the maintenance of regional peace and stability."
  • (18) Clapper described the threats from Pyongyang as "very belligerent" and said he is "very concerned about the actions of the new young leader", Kim Jong-un .
  • (19) Israeli voters – including Labourites disillusioned by what they saw as Palestinian mendacity and belligerency – felt drawn to the old warrior.
  • (20) These conciliatory tactics did not immediately appeal to Thatcher, though she learned to swallow her belligerence.

Quarrelsome


Definition:

  • (a.) Apt or disposed to quarrel; given to brawls and contention; easily irritated or provoked to contest; irascible; choleric.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) She takes him to see a venerated copy in an art gallery, but their prickly, quarrelsome relationship takes a strange turn when he is mistaken by a cafe owner for Binoche's husband.
  • (2) "Late" like the autumnal, musical Eliot of Four Quartets; like the demanding, crepuscular Beethoven quartet the film's characters rehearse for their silver-anniversary performance (String Quartet No 14 in C sharp minor – menacingly referred to as "Op 131"); and "late" in the connected senses of former or dead, which this quarrelsome foursome soon might be if they fail to recover their harmony.
  • (3) An equally quarrelsome perfectionist, only with breasts and less body hair?
  • (4) Quarrelsome behaviour was studied in 48 patients with a litigious-paranoid personality first developing in old age.
  • (5) Watching Agua in Athens, I am surprised by the fact that, while it is full of recognisable Bausch motifs (dancers lining up for a swaggering, quarrelsome beauty parade, or engaged in a quest for affection) some of it proves impossible to follow because so much of the text is spoken in Greek.
  • (6) The author describes the results of clinico-psychopathological study of 68 patients with neurotic states (hysterical, anxiety-phobic) and a psychopath-like syndrome (affective-explosive, hystero-hypochondriac and litigious-quarrelsome) observed long after occupational craniocerebral traumas.
  • (7) Manipulation tactics covaried significantly across self-based and observer-based data sources with personality scales of Neuroticism, Extraversion, Ambitious-Lazy, Arrogant-Unassuming, Quarrelsome-Agreeable, and Calculating and with characteristics of subjects' social environments.
  • (8) A quarrelsome, drinking, childhood home background was often found, at least as regards the attempters, who themselves frequently suffered from emotional conflicts with close contacts, alcohol affliction, criminality, and instability at work.
  • (9) Symptoms like quarrelsomeness, disobedience, abusive language, stealing, truancy, pica, school refusal, enuresis, mental subnormality and poor scholastic performance were significantly more in the LSE group.
  • (10) This is not a little light volunteering in the library – this is heavy-duty hard grind, often quarrelsome, and the people who made it work really are local heroes, whose own lives were changed.
  • (11) I suggest, first, that twice every month the Composer of the Week should be a living person; and, second, that every day some dissenting and quarrelsome voices should be heard (for instance, dismissing Beethoven as boring or Benjamin Britten as shallow).
  • (12) The origin of stomatalgias in psychopathic personalities was accompanied by its decompensation, leading not infrequently to the development of the litigious and quarrelsome personality.
  • (13) The best leaders promote participation and involvement as their core strategy; promote appropriate staff autonomy and accountability for improvement; ensure staff "voices" are encouraged; encourage staff to be proactive and innovative; avoid command and control except in crisis; take action to address systems problems and unnecessary tasks that prevent staff from delivering high quality care; deal effectively and quickly with quarrelsome, rude and disruptive behaviour and poor performance, especially (but not exclusively) among senior staff; and, above all, they model compassion in dealing with patients and staff.
  • (14) In some old patients with a psychogenic quarrelsome paranoiac symptom complex the latter develops by the mechanism of psychic induction.
  • (15) He had always been quarrelsome: now he was soon at odds with those deputies who had been elected in his name.
  • (16) Young Independent Group members were the angries of the art world, the gang was described by one member as "small, cohesive, quarrelsome, abusive".