What's the difference between conundrum and quandary?

Conundrum


Definition:

  • (n.) A kind of riddle based upon some fanciful or fantastic resemblance between things quite unlike; a puzzling question, of which the answer is or involves a pun.
  • (n.) A question to which only a conjectural answer can be made.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The spinal form of MS is a clinical conundrum, the solution of which may yield many answers; to be certain that it is MS and not another disease causing the myelopathy is often difficult.
  • (2) KR: She was truly in a conundrum because without the app, she felt too worthless to try and fix it by installing an update.
  • (3) Ben Carson: inside the worldview of a political conundrum Read more One such priority, he said, was protecting the “religious freedom” of people who believe on religious grounds that marriage is “between one man and one woman”.
  • (4) Tony Goldstone , of the MRC Clinical Science Centre at Imperial College London, scanned the brains of people who skipped meals and found mechanisms at work that could help explain the conundrum.
  • (5) Energy policy's central conundrum today is how to go green at the lowest possible cost.
  • (6) A major constraint is the implementation conundrum.
  • (7) On the road to 2015, all political parties will need to tackle this conundrum if there is going to be a seismic shift away from traditional thinking about how health and social care are delivered.
  • (8) Needless to say, BoKlok's brains have grappled with the conundrum.
  • (9) But the need to change and to integrate health and social care presents a huge conundrum for policymakers, given that such reforms remain "notoriously" controversial and unpopular with the public.
  • (10) These comparable characteristics may help explain a continuing conundrum in the responses to disorder literature: the loose coupling between crime and fear levels at the local level.
  • (11) To explore this conundrum, we need to start by looking at what happiness actually means.
  • (12) It is concluded that properly conducted cross-cultural research can yield results which can help to resolve the conundrum of depression and respond to the challenge which depression poses to the society, to public health authorities and to the individuals who suffer from it.
  • (13) The anser to this conundrum, that the kidney was sometimes the cause and sometimes the consequence of circulatory disease was suggested by Mahomed's discovery of essential hypertension but confirmation had to await the invention of a clinically useful sphygmomanometer.
  • (14) Impossible to count.” He added: “No one knows.” The city has spent years trying to resolve this conundrum.
  • (15) Newspapers in the US had never before had to deal with the conundrum of what to do with leaked documents that had been procured illegally by people not in official positions.
  • (16) Labour, which has yet to resolve its own testing conundrums, will have to confront these challenges one day too.
  • (17) The British government has given its first official hint that it hopes the Irish external border will provide the solution to one of the most vexing conundrums of Brexit: how to pull up the immigration drawbridge without installing a “hard border” of customs posts and passport checks between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
  • (18) That’s the conundrum.” In a statement on Wednesday, Farron said the time had come for a deputy leader, given the party had elected a number of new women MPs when only men were elected in 2015.
  • (19) As the election haze clears, Trump’s China conundrum will become clear | Jonathan Fenby Read more That’s Trump’s first contribution to a Pacific agenda: an increase in South Koreans and Japanese who believe they should be nuclear-armed because American cannot be relied on, especially with North Korea fine-tuning its missile capacity.
  • (20) As the election haze clears, Trump’s China conundrum will become clear | Jonathan Fenby Read more Zhang Xiangchen, China’s deputy international trade representative, also told a news conference in Washington on Wednesday that a broad consensus of academics, business people and government officials have concluded that China is not manipulating its yuan currency to gain an unfair trade advantage, as Trump has charged.

Quandary


Definition:

  • (n.) A state of difficulty or perplexity; doubt; uncertainty.
  • (v. t.) To bring into a state of uncertainty, perplexity, or difficulty.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) He’s a great defender when he hits you but when you have guys like Matt Giteau who is light on his feet and can change direction …” And what of England, hosts of the tournament who, beset by selection quandaries, forgot the fundamentals against France last weekend.
  • (2) On occasions, they result in some diagnostic and therapeutic quandaries.
  • (3) 12.06pm BST Our own Dan Lucas was first to answer the refereeing quandary of the day, pointing out that Fifa's Law 17 says this: A goalkeeper who is injured while kicks are being taken from the penalty mark and is unable to continue as goalkeeper may be replaced by a named substitute provided his team has not used the maximum number of substitutes permitted under the competition rules.
  • (4) This, if anything, demonstrates the quandary and complexity of financial regulation.
  • (5) These two distinct paradigms lead to divergent treatment goals, which leaves the clinician in a quandary about how best to treat an individual who experiences a drinking problem.
  • (6) The quandary is a familiar one to every football fan who has watched his or her team score a goal while surrounded by rival supporters.
  • (7) "Egypt is in a quandary – it doesn't want to punish Gaza by closing the tunnels, but it needs to secure Sinai," said one western diplomat.
  • (8) The quandary of how to determine the value of human life and health is an essential problem but is certainly not straight forward.
  • (9) Some of the theoretical quandaries associated with the concept are briefly reviewed.
  • (10) Specific quandaries arise with involuntary hospitalization and treatment, and with evaluating patients for the courts.
  • (11) Since RecA protein lacks demonstrable helicase activity, the mechanism by which it pushes strand exchange through long heterologous inserts has been a quandary.
  • (12) This leaves Scotland's policymakers in something of a quandary: how can you tackle a problem when you don't know what is causing it?
  • (13) Practical solutions to the quandaries posed by the qualitative-quantitative dichotomy are explicated, with supporting methodological examples for nursing research studies.
  • (14) Such thirtysomething quandaries, of course, are found in greater-than-average concentration in Hollywood, where a good deal of the writers, directors and executives fall into this group; this is one reason why so many of these films have been produced.
  • (15) "The whole of the radio industry is in a bit of a quandary.
  • (16) This fixture has, in the Wenger era, been all about Arsenal's possession of the perfect answer to every quandary.
  • (17) One of the biggest quandaries among those who study radicalisation is identifying the point at which individuals move from "extremism" to "violent extremism".
  • (18) Knitting and sewing take place at its Los Angeles HQ, and it boasts an enviable benefits package for its workers (on the flipside, CEO Dov Charney has been dogged by accusations of alleged sexual harassment, which throws up its own ethical quandaries).
  • (19) And therein lies a quandary: how can a casual who must only say yes ever enter into a real and honest dialogue with the permanent staff who employ them?
  • (20) Underlying it all, there's not only rightful compassion for victims, but also perhaps relief that we don't have to face such quandaries.