What's the difference between deaden and deafen?

Deaden


Definition:

  • (a.) To make as dead; to impair in vigor, force, activity, or sensation; to lessen the force or acuteness of; to blunt; as, to deaden the natural powers or feelings; to deaden a sound.
  • (a.) To lessen the velocity or momentum of; to retard; as, to deaden a ship's headway.
  • (a.) To make vapid or spiritless; as, to deaden wine.
  • (a.) To deprive of gloss or brilliancy; to obscure; as, to deaden gilding by a coat of size.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Later, when Leven moved to another squat, in Maida Vale, London, he suggested they bring in a bass player and percussionist to form a band, and they started rehearsing "with mattresses around the walls to deaden the sound, but still annoying the neighbours".
  • (2) But I am trying to claw the innocent joy of Halloween out of the cold, deadened clutches of the Zombie of Forced Sexiness.
  • (3) My guides are three of the founders of a pressure group-cum-political party called 1st 4 Kirkby , founded to try to break through what they see as deadened local politics (there are 63 councillors in the borough of Knowsley, all of them Labour), and push for a very different regeneration plan.
  • (4) Yesterday, David Cameron pushed things along , acknowledging that boosting Holyrood’s status would reopen big questions for England, and making reference to last year’s report by the McKay commission – a plan that offered a somewhat underwhelming vision of “compromise rather than conflict”, but set out a future in which: “Decisions taken in the Commons which have a separate and distinct effect for England (or England-and-Wales)” would largely “be taken only with the consent of a majority of MPs sitting for constituencies in England (or England-and-Wales).” As is usually the case with such texts, most of it was couched in terms of deadened officialspeak.
  • (5) All this dust has a peculiar way of deadening the sound.
  • (6) These scenes still have a certain, fleeting power and effect – even if we are deadened and wearied by the pornographic thrill of spectacular screen violence.
  • (7) And it's a bit deadening because journalists are, as a rule, better at thinking about journalism – including the most fundamental question of all, hinted at in my title tonight – of whether there is such a thing as journalism.
  • (8) With its tendencies to exhaust, to amplify despair, to deaden my anguish briefly before bringing it back two-fold – booze was counter to the mission.
  • (9) Despite the diversity of his career, a common thread throughout all his films, from the gleeful highs of Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, True Romance, The Last Boy Scout and Crimson Tide, to the deadening lows of his first film The Hunger, Revenge and Domino (Keira Knightley plays a bounty hunter – let us speak no more about it), is the whizz-bang-chop-cut style.
  • (10) The familiar biblical words, the quavering congregation working its way through Victorian hymns, the priest, who often has never met the deceased: all these deaden and distance.
  • (11) Though Tony Blair (currently, in his pronouncements on the EU , highlighting Labour's reputation for floating far above ordinary lives with an amazing absence of self-awareness) was actually a much better rhetorician than received wisdom suggests, everyone around him quickly succumbed to a deadened kind of thought and expression.
  • (12) In the US, relying on donors deadens the arts, filling their boards with the conservative-minded, failing to stimulate experiment and imagination – as only independent funding can.
  • (13) It also plans to mitigate the deadening effects of strict delineation of segments of the city by creating mixed-use neighbourhood centres using “new design ideas and concepts to provide a complete live-work-play-learn environment for residents”.
  • (14) The word "consultation" has that deadening thud of the political euphemism.
  • (15) It is perhaps some token of their jitteriness about school surveillance that no minister will talk to me, but I am invited to send in a list of questions, which brings forth a pretty miserable response, indicative of that ingrained tendency of people in power to respond to stuff based on matters of principle with deadening officialspeak.
  • (16) The spectre of “old corruption” – a deadening lattice of sweetheart deals, public offices traded for personal profit – was a permanent fixture at British elections until the mid-19th century.
  • (17) He asked for "pardon for those who are complacent and closed amid comforts which have deadened their hearts" and "forgiveness for those who by their decisions at the global level have created situations that lead to these tragedies".
  • (18) Similarly, alcohol is often used to reduce anxiety and deaden sadness.
  • (19) Boredom and a deadening sense of total pointlessness seem to drive a lot of meaningless crimes, from the Hungerford and Columbine shootings to the Dando murder, and there have been dozens of similar crimes in the US and elsewhere over the past 30 years.
  • (20) The possible action, as risk factor of peripheral arteriosclerosis, of the emotional stress; the effect of the social support to deaden this stress, and some aspects of the personality as fundamental regulator of the individual behaviour, are analyzed.

Deafen


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To make deaf; to deprive of the power of hearing; to render incapable of perceiving sounds distinctly.
  • (v. t.) To render impervious to sound, as a partition or floor, by filling the space within with mortar, by lining with paper, etc.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In the second experiment, intact females copulated twice with a male: once when they were able to hear and once when they were temporarily deafened with a medical ear mold.
  • (2) When the old BBC governors – a system of governance that essentially dated back to 1922 – was dismantled in 2006 the outcry that there might be something quickly nicknamed Ofbeeb was deafening.
  • (3) Adult song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) were tested for response to songs of conspecific males that had been reared in acoustic isolation or deafened early in life.
  • (4) Electroneural response patterns of single auditory-nerve neurons were studied in aminoglycoside-deafened squirrel monkeys.
  • (5) Wang, from Human Rights Watch, said that after a period of deafening silence those governments now needed to find their voice to ensure Liu Xia’s safety.
  • (6) The main structure will be delimited by 600 minarets, each shaped like an upraised middle finger, and housing a powerful amplifier: when synchronised, their combined sonic might will be capable of relaying the muezzin's call to prayer at such deafening volume, it will be clearly audible in the Afghan mountains, where thousands of terrorists are poised to celebrate by running around with scarves over their faces, firing AK-47s into the sky and yelling whatever the foreign word for "victory" is.
  • (7) If that happens, Osborne will get the blame as the hissing becomes deafening.
  • (8) These people stand at the edges of our avenues, of our streets, in deafening anonymity.” The passionate exhortation came hours after he addressed the United Nations , prayed at Ground Zero, visited a school in Harlem and cruised through Central Park, where 80,000 people greeted the 78-year-old Argentinean with rapture.
  • (9) The implantation of electrodes in neomycin-deafened cats did not result in heavy neuronal degeneration.
  • (10) Mobile phone messages and television advertisements urged an end to the dangerous and deafening habit of celebratory gunfire, which has caused several deaths and scores of injuries.
  • (11) Deafening, however, had no apparent, permanent effect on social behavior.
  • (12) Miliband defended his leadership on a tour round a south London market, amid criticism from colleagues that Labour has allowed a deafening silence to take hold over the parliamentary recess.
  • (13) One program focuses on postlingually deafened children from the ages of 10 to 17, while the other is designed for deafened children from 2 to 9 years.
  • (14) "We should, of course, listen to the interests associated with us, and the assortment of pressure groups banging on our door but never conflate their noise, which with social media can seem deafening, with public opinion or let them decide policy.
  • (15) We reexamined the effects of T on song-control nuclei in deafened birds.
  • (16) Etiology and genesis of the deafness are important in the sense that progressive deafened patients and patients with a post-leutic deafness have better expectations than those with a meningitic or traumatic deafness.
  • (17) We have also examined the effect of sinusoids on deafened implantees with tinnitus and conclude that tinnitus can be suppressed in some individuals with low frequency sine waves.
  • (18) Simulating a 10 micron unmyelinated termination for this model neuron produces a strength-duration curve that closely fits the single-neuron data obtained from aminoglycoside deafened animals.
  • (19) In the name of this suffering people, whose cries to heaven become more deafening each day, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression,” he said in a speech to government soldiers the day before his death.
  • (20) In five profoundly deafened adults, performance was better in consonant identification when additional speech patterns were present than with fundamental frequency alone; the main advantage was derived from amplitude information.

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