What's the difference between bicker and quarrel?

Bicker


Definition:

  • (n.) A small wooden vessel made of staves and hoops, like a tub.
  • (v. i.) To skirmish; to exchange blows; to fight.
  • (v. i.) To contend in petulant altercation; to wrangle.
  • (v. i.) To move quickly and unsteadily, or with a pattering noise; to quiver; to be tremulous, like flame.
  • (n.) A skirmish; an encounter.
  • (n.) A fight with stones between two parties of boys.
  • (n.) A wrangle; also, a noise,, as in angry contention.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) When she is bickering with Bleeker about the conception, and it looks as though he is going to have the last word by telling her that he has kept her knickers as a memento, she, without missing a beat, says, "I still have your virginity."
  • (2) The head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) yesterday urged diplomats to stop bickering about a mini package of liberalisation designed to boost global commerce and warned of serious damage to the 20-year-old institution if last-ditch talks failed.
  • (3) "We wanted a backdrop of global espionage, and then the goal was to ignore it as much as possible to focus on people bickering," Reed explains.
  • (4) Over the Atlantic, as politicians bicker over the debt-reduction programme, Moody's has said the US's top-notch credit rating is under review.
  • (5) From upstairs comes the reassuring sound of children bickering.
  • (6) It could not be more fortunate for employers, the ease with which we can be set to bickering among ourselves.
  • (7) An unlikely coalition of sworn enemies, who had campaigned together under the Better Together slogan of “No Thanks”, came to a juddering and messy end as the UK parties bickered over future voting rights of MPs at Westminster.
  • (8) Which makes me wonder if the Dutch (my people btw) will succumb to the bickering and discontent of their recent Euro outing on the first sign of trouble.
  • (9) After observing a couple of weeks of bickering over who would get what time, we threatened to remove them again, whereupon the boys negotiated with each other and came up with an equitable time-sharing agreement.
  • (10) The ensuing months of uncertainty and bickering have not always gone down well with voters .
  • (11) On one question, at least, the bickering candidates in Wednesday’s Republican debate did agree: it was a juvenile way to pick a president.
  • (12) A single example, plucked at random from a lifetime's supply: years ago, after I'd been bickering with a friend who was visiting my flat in London, she fell silent for several minutes and then, pointing to my wooden floors, observed, "You know that floor's laminate, don't you?"
  • (13) Incrementally, forwards and backwards, prevaricating, bickering: so it has been for three years of European troubles that began on the periphery, in Greece, but have spread to the heartland, condemning Europe to a lost decade.
  • (14) In delivering his inflammatory speech, the president was defying Khamenei who a few weeks ago warned officials against bickering, saying those who bring disputes to public attention are "betraying" the revolution.
  • (15) Open Mon-Wed 12.30pm-1am, Thurs-Sat 12.30pm-1.30am, closed Sundays Bar The Clinic Facebook Twitter Pinterest Owned by Chile’s top satirical magazine, The Clinic , and covered in its political cartoons, this infamous bar is where the intelligentsia comes to bicker over beers.
  • (16) Amid the bickering, there was also a sense that Kerry's visit may indicate a failure of Afghanistan's fledgling democratic process.
  • (17) Mohamed El-Erian , chief executive of Pimco: For the sake of their country and the wider global economy, both parties should resist the urge to begin bickering.
  • (18) She also added her voice to the welter of criticism over the bickering performance of the BBC's top brass – current and former – in front of the Commons public accounts committee on Monday.
  • (19) … You’re going to get what I think, whether you like it or not, whether it makes you cringe every once in a while or not.” Decrying “bickering leaders in Washington DC”, Christie held out his record as a fiscally conservative governor with a record early in his tenure of bipartisan victories as evidence of change he could bring to the national capital.
  • (20) Noah’s presence should an international flavour to the show, hopefully breaking it out of its obsession with the 24-hour news channels and petty Washington bickering.

Quarrel


Definition:

  • (n.) An arrow for a crossbow; -- so named because it commonly had a square head.
  • (n.) Any small square or quadrangular member
  • (n.) A square of glass, esp. when set diagonally.
  • (n.) A small opening in window tracery, of which the cusps, etc., make the form nearly square.
  • (n.) A square or lozenge-shaped paving tile.
  • (n.) A glazier's diamond.
  • (n.) A four-sided cutting tool or chisel having a diamond-shaped end.
  • (n.) A breach of concord, amity, or obligation; a falling out; a difference; a disagreement; an antagonism in opinion, feeling, or conduct; esp., an angry dispute, contest, or strife; a brawl; an altercation; as, he had a quarrel with his father about expenses.
  • (n.) Ground of objection, dislike, difference, or hostility; cause of dispute or contest; occasion of altercation.
  • (n.) Earnest desire or longing.
  • (v. i.) To violate concord or agreement; to have a difference; to fall out; to be or become antagonistic.
  • (v. i.) To dispute angrily, or violently; to wrangle; to scold; to altercate; to contend; to fight.
  • (v. i.) To find fault; to cavil; as, to quarrel with one's lot.
  • (v. t.) To quarrel with.
  • (v. t.) To compel by a quarrel; as, to quarrel a man out of his estate or rights.
  • (n.) One who quarrels or wrangles; one who is quarrelsome.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In Belfast, the old quarrels just look likely to drag on in their old familiar way.
  • (2) I have no quarrel with the overall thrust of Andrew Rawnsley's argument that the south-east is over-dominant in the UK economy and, as someone who has lived and worked both in Cardiff and Newcastle upon Tyne, I have sympathy with the claims of the north-east of England as well as Wales (" No wonder the coalition hasn't many friends in the north ", Comment).
  • (3) This quarrel split the black movement down the middle, and was compounded by Du Bois's ideas on leadership.
  • (4) The pair departed La Liga last summer, only to quarrel again at Chelsea and Manchester City.
  • (5) Berezovsky, a Kremlin insider in the days of Boris Yeltsin, left Russia in 2000 after a quarrel with Vladimir Putin and has been the subject of an extradition order by Russia .
  • (6) Premeditated murders are also rare in Finland (roughly 40 per year), but homicides sadly occur out of quarrels between socially marginalised drunken adult men.
  • (7) It's a quarrel between substance and form, if you like, a question of emphasis – does a country's nature owe most to its history, or to its land?
  • (8) It fell to Van Rompuy to deal with quarrelling national leaders over the EU's worst ever crisis – the euro, the sovereign debt and financial turmoil.
  • (9) But American conservatives for the most part have had no quarrel with vaccines – unless they are on a collision course with other deeply held beliefs, said John Evans, who teaches bioethics at the University of California at San Diego and is married to Schreiber.
  • (10) Although Arendt agreed with the final verdict of the trial, namely, that Eichmann should be condemned to death, she quarreled with the reasoning put forward at the trial and with the spectacle of the trial itself.
  • (11) While we are rooted here going la-la-la auld Ireland (because at this distance in time the words escape us) our neighbours are patching their quarrels, losing their origins and moving on, to modern, non-sectarian forms of stigma, expressed in modern songs: you are a scouser, a dirty scouser.
  • (12) The quarrels he had with most of his subordinates culminated as he was in command of the East Indies Squadron, applying sometimes exaggerated punishments.
  • (13) The few big publishers that now continue functioning at all under the deliberately destructive pressure of Amazon marketing strategies are increasingly controlled by that pressure.” The tech giant is not only trying to control the bookselling industry but also the publishing world, she writes: “Amazon uses the BS Machine to sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we begin to think that’s what literature is.” She assures her readers that her “only quarrel with Amazon is when it comes to how they market books and how they use their success in marketing to control not only bookselling, but book publication: what we write and what we read.” She stressed that she has no issue with other areas of the tech giant’s business, including self-publishing: “Amazon and I are not at war.
  • (14) A case of a 35-year-old male who died suddenly after a blow on the chest by his opponent during a quarrel.
  • (15) They never subsequently claimed exclusive credit, and never quarrelled.
  • (16) By the 1970's the quarrel shifted from affective questions to matters of effectiveness and efficiency.
  • (17) Establishment outrage reached spittingly aggressive proportions when Ali, pleading deferment on religious grounds, told reporters: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong … no Vietcong ever called me ‘nigger’.” Within an hour, outraged, all US boxing bodies suspended his licence and stripped him of his title.
  • (18) I was brought up in a culture that shied away from argument because wherever there is quarrelling there will sooner or later be murder.
  • (19) But Quo Vadis laid bare an inhibition possibly implanted in his schooldays or by his quarrelling parents; he could not portray passionate feelings without looking foolish.
  • (20) One rhetorical feature of her book on Eichmann is that she is, time and again, breaking out into a quarrel with the man himself.