What's the difference between contemptuous and disdainful?

Contemptuous


Definition:

  • (a.) Manifesting or expressing contempt or disdain; scornful; haughty; insolent; disdainful.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) He was contemptuous of Nelson’s small target strategy even in the early years in opposition, insisting voters always needed to know what a party stood for, and that it should stand for big ideas.
  • (2) Sly, underhanded, contemptuous, mendacious, double-dealing, cheating democracy.
  • (3) He dictates the next rally and when Murray decides to go for another lob, Dimitrov is on to the ruse and swats a contemptuous smash away to seal the first set that flashed by in the blink of an eye!
  • (4) (Of course, she was also perfectly aware of the feminist content, what it said about the disgusted-attracted-contemptuous male gaze, but she preferred the art to ask the questions, discomfit, not preach.)
  • (5) Thatcher was contemptuous of "the centre ground" and withering about consensus politics, holding it to be responsible for Britain's postwar decline and believing it to be a recipe for getting nothing done.
  • (6) It held its first national congress in Algiers, and although it was contemptuous of existing political organisations, Poujade made his own political party, Union et Fraternité Française.
  • (7) His enemies argue that he divided Europe by launching an illegal war; he kept the UK out of the eurozone and the Schengen agreement ; he is contemptuous of democracy (surely a qualification?
  • (8) It is rife with secrecy, top-down managerial manipulation, impervious to any outside scrutiny, contemptuous of any questioning, and has embraced extensive surveillance and discriminatory policing of religious and racial minorities.
  • (9) Photograph: AAP In her famous 1913 pamphlet, Round about a pound a week , Maud Pember Reeves wrote contemptuously about “the gospel of porridge” – the idea, still common among the wealthy, that the destitute wouldn’t be so wretched if only they invested their money wisely.
  • (10) Norte Energia officials are privately contemptuous.
  • (11) The voices (which by this time had multiplied and become much more aggressive) were witheringly contemptuous about this: "You can't even SPELL schizophrenia," one of them said, "So what the hell are you going to do about having it?!"
  • (12) Facebook Twitter Pinterest The words returned to haunt Renzi for weeks afterwards, in the fitting form, for this most Twitter-friendly of premiers, of contemptuous hashtags and YouTube satire.
  • (13) Judge Alistair McCreath said: "When a defendant makes a considered decision to abscond as you did he or she has shown a contemptuous disregard for that important obligation and that in itself matters."
  • (14) "If it is false, it is libellous; if it is true, it is contemptuous," he added.
  • (15) He was contemptuous of the way a powerful lobby had manipulated Jewish American opinion, although this compared with the way "the Greek, Armenian, Ukrainian and Irish diasporas have all played an unhealthy role in perpetuating ethnic exclusivism and nationalist prejudice in the countries of their forebears".
  • (16) But a decade ago, executive leadership fell into the hands of people obsessed with "get big quick" and openly contemptuous of co-operative values.
  • (17) The campaign, according to Graham, ignored focus group research that showed people were contemptuous of the idea that electoral reform would prevent corruption.
  • (18) "He doesn't do anything that presidents do, he doesn't worry about any of the things the presidents do, but he has the White House, he has enormous power, and he'll go down in history as the president – and I suspect that he's pretty contemptuous of the rest of us."
  • (19) Delivering the prestigious Hugh Cudlipp lecture, Dacre harangued what he dubbed the "subsidariat" of newspapers - in which he included the Times and the Guardian - which do not turn a profit and are "consumed by the kind of political correctness that is patronisingly contemptuous of what it describes as ordinary people".
  • (20) Whatever I asked him about, he was fantastically hostile and contemptuous.

Disdainful


Definition:

  • (a.) Full of disdain; expressing disdain; scornful; contemptuous; haughty.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) People praying, voicing their views and heart, were met with disdain and a level of force exceeding what was needed.
  • (2) Fred had to be substituted to shield him from the crowd’s disdain.
  • (3) It may have been like punk never ‘appened, but you caught a whiff of the movement’s scorched earth puritanism in the mocking disdain with which Smash Hits addressed rock-star hedonism.
  • (4) TV's Jeremy Paxman didn't even bother hiding his disdain for the introduction of weather reports to Newsnight – "It's April.
  • (5) It shows that we still have some way to go to end bigoted banter.” The exchange was also met with disdain on Twitter.
  • (6) He has frequently tested the patience of Japan's conservative sumo authorities with his disdain for the rules of engagement in the ring and his bad behaviour off it.
  • (7) His comic adventures are too many to relate, but it may be said that they culminate in a café of 'singing waiters' where, after a wealth of comic 'business' with the tray, he shows his disdain for articulate speech by singing a vividly explicit song in gibberish.
  • (8) Immigration has been used as a 21st-century incomes policy, mixing a liberal sense of free for all with a free-market disdain for clear and effective rules.
  • (9) Riva, the oldest nominee ever for best actress category, has a very Gallic disdain for such public adulation.
  • (10) "Historians will pore over his many speeches to black audiences," wrote Ta-Nahisi Coates at The Atlantic, and "they will see a president who sought to hold black people accountable for their communities, but was disdainful of those who looked at him and sought the same".
  • (11) Born in July 1954, Christopher Murray Paul-Huhne (his surname until he went to Oxford) has always been something of a Marmite politician, attracting both loyalty and affection, as well as brickbats and disdain.
  • (12) Gil Eliyahu, who stopped working for Binyamin and Sara Netanyahu two and a half years ago, is threatening to sue the couple, claiming he was treated with "humiliating" disdain.
  • (13) It was one of at least half a dozen such unionist experiments, with a variety of partners, which foundered on the rocks of the would-be partners' infirmity of purpose, fear, suspicion and disdain of this bizarre, arrogant, impetuous upstart.
  • (14) Safronkov reserved his fiercest disdain for the UK envoy, Matthew Rycroft, who had said that UK scientists had determined that sarin had been used in the Khan Sheikhun attack and called on Russia to cut ties with Assad, who Rycroft said was bringing Moscow only “shame and humiliation”.
  • (15) The rules extended from healthcare to the environment to workplace safety, but all were grounded in Bush's disdain for the government's role as a regulatory authority.
  • (16) Stevenson did not disdain the genre in which he was operating.
  • (17) Issues Sir Ken, on the other hand, is a professional Yorkshireman and farmer - the sort of chap who prefers to call a retail outlet a shop and treated press and City with equal disdain.
  • (18) The pent-up fury of the parents reflected the intensity of the violent protests that marked a dramatic week in Mexico, which has deepened the political crisis facing President Enrique Peña Nieto as he returns from a week-long trip to China and Australia, seen by many as a sign of disdain for the suffering and anger at home.
  • (19) What is clear now, for those for whom it was ever in doubt, is the reality of Tory values: the disdain with which they view the less fortunate and the reason why the annual cull of the impoverished through malnutrition and hypothermia is not a problem to them.
  • (20) Instead – spoiler alert – to the disdain of many, it opted for a more satisfying, upbeat conclusion.