What's the difference between calamitous and disastrous?

Calamitous


Definition:

  • (a.) Suffering calamity; wretched; miserable.
  • (a.) Producing, or attended with distress and misery; making wretched; wretched; unhappy.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Such views are increasingly common all over Detroit, the forlorn former capital of America's car industry and now a by-word for calamitous urban decline.
  • (2) Opening heroin consumption rooms We have spent nearly 50 calamitous years treating drug addiction as a criminal justice matter rather than a social and medical problem.
  • (3) If that attitude could sometimes frustrate senior editors’ desire to raise standards – if it could, in the end, be blamed for the calamitous failure to spot the misdeeds of Johann Hari – it was also the only thing that kept the paper from falling apart completely: an irresistibly romantic underdog spirit, a sense that since this plainly wasn’t a viable business, it had to be a cause.
  • (4) That spirit of co-operation represents a drastic change from the calamitous Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, when diplomatic snubs and general distrust between the two countries wrecked any prospect for a deal.
  • (5) Without them, it would be like the calamitous three-day service outage of October 2011 – permanently.
  • (6) His seventh goal in his last seven games for Wales, after a calamitous mistake from Radja Nainggolan, was the difference on a evening that ended with the Real Madrid forward leaving the field to a standing ovation two minutes from time.
  • (7) As ruthless as Liverpool were with their finishing, in particular the irrepressible Luis Suárez , who scored twice to take his tally for the season to 22, Stoke were guilty of some calamitous defending and contributed largely to their own downfall.
  • (8) While calamitous action unfolds on screen, Green imparts anecdotes, socio-political analysis and the kind of life advice you might expect from his day-job as a best selling author and progressive digital campaigner.
  • (9) Rather than boasting of calamitous missions, the politicians responsible for them must be held to account.
  • (10) Second-chance Sunday in Gosford In truth, Justin Pasfield’s calamitous goalkeeping against Newcastle last week was about as cringe-worthy as his new hipster beard-haircut combination.
  • (11) Blair’s calamitous war in Iraq and Cameron’s radical domestic agenda implemented in a hung parliament are cited as examples of mighty power exerted against the will of the people.
  • (12) They’re a pro-X Factor paper.” But his book arguably also proves the alternative explanation for his calamitous public image.
  • (13) This is not to say that I think his presidency has been without its serious, even calamitous, failures, the most important of which is his unwillingness to intervene in any meaningful way in Syria.
  • (14) You would expect newspaper sales to drop in August as readers head for the beaches, so the important comparison is the year-on-year figures which range from catastrophic to calamitous.
  • (15) Referring repeatedly to “our friends and allies in the EU”, the prime minister added she had no interest in the bloc unravelling: “It remains overwhelmingly and compellingly in Britain’s national interest that the EU should succeed.” But she warned that if the EU 27 heeded those “voices calling for a punitive deal that punishes Britain”, it would amount to “an act of calamitous self-harm for the countries of Europe.
  • (16) The Kensington and Chelsea council leader, Nick Paget-Brown, stepped down on Friday along with his deputy following another calamitous week that included a bungled attempt by the council to hold a cabinet meeting behind closed doors.
  • (17) The victors will have a home tie against Watford, who scraped past Leeds thanks to a calamitous Scott Wootton own goal.
  • (18) But it wasn't just on the war on terror that opponents of the New World Order were shown to be right and its cheerleaders to be talking calamitous nonsense.
  • (19) Previous research has shown three quarters of the world’s listed reserves of carbon producing fuels must stay in the ground if the world is to avoid calamitous climate change.
  • (20) "Fears about growth in Europe, Asia and the US, where calamitous existing home sales figures were the focus...

Disastrous


Definition:

  • (a.) Full of unpropitious stellar influences; unpropitious; ill-boding.
  • (a.) Attended with suffering or disaster; very unfortunate; calamitous; ill-fated; as, a disastrous day; a disastrous termination of an undertaking.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) However, we have observed cracks on the Dacron fibers, fiber fracture, fiber protrusion, and poor attachment to the diaphragm, which can cause potentially disastrous complications.
  • (2) This proposal is a purely partisan move that will backfire on the government disastrously.” The Green party accused Osborne of making “efforts to limit the democratic scrutiny of his austerity agenda”.
  • (3) They moved to shore up May’s position after a weekend of damaging leaks and briefings from inside the cabinet, believed to be fuelled by some of those jostling to succeed the prime minister after her disastrous election result.
  • (4) To leave the Euro, says Clarke, would be "disastrous" for the Greeks.
  • (5) There are no easy answers to these problems, but we must recognise that a muri approach is potentially disastrous.
  • (6) Prior planning of the coverage before the excision pays dividends by preventing disastrous complications.
  • (7) But Frank argues the disastrous attempt at curbing markets through currency reform in 2009 has shown the cost of turning back from change.
  • (8) Getting them to safety is now vital.” While the EU’s hotspots approach improved the fingerprinting and security vetting of migrants, the auditors said that funding and relocation “bottlenecks” had extended the detention of migrants, with disastrous consequences for children.
  • (9) He argued that it was vital that we “should give the people of this country a chance to decide”, and that “[the nation was witnessing] a continuation of that old and disastrous system where a few men in charge of the state, wielding the whole force of the state, make secret engagements and secret arrangements, carefully veiled from the knowledge of the people…” This, and a lot more little-known information on the road to the first world war is given in Douglas Newton’s book The Darkest Days .
  • (10) However, the shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander , is adamant Labour could not afford to spend the first two years of government wrestling with a referendum on Europe, pointing to the energy it had expended on the near-disastrous no campaign for the Scotland independence vote.
  • (11) The disastrous launches of SimCity and Battlefield 4 , the confining and somewhat invasive nature of the publisher’s Origin digital gaming platform and the voraciously monetised smartphone version of Dungeon Keeper, have kicked further dents in its reputation.
  • (12) Austin said: "Since the House of Lords judgment, the police have increased their use of the tactic of kettling, with disastrous consequences for the right to peaceful protest and the safety of protesters.
  • (13) By trading Holiday for Noel, the 76ers are effectively ending the Andrew Bynum experiment after one disastrous year and seem likely to start a rebuilding process.
  • (14) Casting a vote for any of the alternative party or independent candidates in November could have truly disastrous effects.
  • (15) If she learns anything from this disastrous outing, I hope itʼs that if sheʼs going to allow the music industry to play her as a sex object, she needs to at least own it.
  • (16) Mike Griffiths, headteacher at Northampton School for Boys, the first high-performing school to become an academy after Gove became secretary of state for education in May 2010, said the issue would not only have a potentially disastrous effect on pupils who failed to get a necessary C grade in English, but also on those hoping to study at elite institutions who fell short of getting As or A*s. "If you are applying to a Russell Group university, for instance, to study medicine or law, and all the applicants have a string of A*s, they will look back to the GCSEs and see a B in English – and that could decide your fate," he said.
  • (17) As well as causing a breakdown in trust between the north and the capital, and between communities in the north, caused by the occupation, the conflict has been economically disastrous.
  • (18) "People forget that I discussed two types of disaster in my book: disastrous developments and disastrous failures to develop."
  • (19) In 1993, at the Branch Davidian religious compound outside Waco, Texas, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms didn’t wait for the sect leader, David Koresh, to leave before attempting to arrest him and got into a gun battle that claimed 10 victims and led to a disastrous 51-day siege culminating in dozens more deaths.
  • (20) Lord of the Rings made him the doomed anti-hero , he was easily the best thing in the disastrous Troy, giving Odysseus guile, wit and that familiar, rough-edged charm, and he terrified TV viewers as property developer John Dawson in the dark and brilliant Red Riding .