What's the difference between decide and dictate?

Decide


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To cut off; to separate.
  • (v. t.) To bring to a termination, as a question, controversy, struggle, by giving the victory to one side or party; to render judgment concerning; to determine; to settle.
  • (v. i.) To determine; to form a definite opinion; to come to a conclusion; to give decision; as, the court decided in favor of the defendant.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) That means deciding what job they’d like to have and outlining the steps they’ll need to take to achieve it.
  • (2) But when they decided to get married, "finding the clothes became my project," says Melanie.
  • (3) Schneiderlin, valued at an improbable £27m, and the currently injured Jay Rodriguez are wanted by their former manager Mauricio Pochettino at Spurs, but the chairman Ralph Krueger has apparently called a halt to any more outgoings, saying: “They are part of the core that we have decided to keep at Southampton.” He added: “Jay Rodriguez and Morgan Schneiderlin are not for sale and they will be a part of our club as we enter the new season.” The new manager Ronald Koeman has begun rebuilding by bringing in Dusan Tadic and Graziano Pellè from the Dutch league and Krueger said: “We will have players coming in, we will make transfers to strengthen the squad.
  • (4) I can see you use humour as a defence mechanism, so in return I could just tell you that if he's massively rich or famous and you've decided you'll put up with it to please him, you'll eventually discover it's not worth it.
  • (5) When you have been out for a month you need to prepare properly before you come back.” Pellegrini will make his own assessment of Kompany’s fitness before deciding whether to play him in the Bournemouth game, which he is careful to stress may not be the foregone conclusion the league table might suggest.
  • (6) It was then I decided to take up the offer from Berkeley."
  • (7) Problem definition, the first step in policy development, includes identifying the issues, discussing and framing the issues, analyzing data and resources, and deciding on a problem definition.
  • (8) I also decided that the Kushner-Harvard relationship deserved special attention.
  • (9) One is the right not to be impeded when they are going to the House of Commons to vote, which may partly explain why the police decided to arrest Green and raid his offices last week on Thursday, when the Commons was not sitting.
  • (10) I haven't had to face anyone like the man who threatened to call the police when he decided his card had been cloned after sharing three bottles of wine with his wife, or the drunk woman who became violent and announced that she was a solicitor who was going to get this fucking place shut down – two customers Andrew had to deal with on the same night.
  • (11) So the government wants a “root and branch” review to decide whether the BBC has “been chasing mass ratings at the expense of its original public service brief” ( BBC faces ‘root and branch’ review of its size and remit , 13 July).
  • (12) It was only up to jurors to decide if the hotel owner, West End Hotel Partners, and former operator, Windsor Capital Group, should share in the blame.
  • (13) Statistical diagnostic tests are used for the final evaluation of the method acceptability, specifically in deciding whether or not the systematic error indicated requires a root source search for its removal or is simply a calibration constant of the method.
  • (14) Since 1987 consultation-liaison (C-L) psychiatrists in Europe have decided to develop a closer collaboration to stimulate the development of the C-L field.
  • (15) "We were very disappointed when the DH decided to suspend printing Reduce the Risk, a vital resource in the prevention of cot death in the UK", said Francine Bates, chief executive of the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths, which helped produce the booklet.
  • (16) He won the Labour candidacy for the Scottish seat of Kilmarnock and Loudon in 1997, within weeks of polling day, after the sitting Labour MP, Willie McKelvey, decided to stand down when he suffered a stroke.
  • (17) The authors decided to keep in this series only hips presenting with a very considerable upward displacement of the femoral head of type IV in Crowe, Maini and Ranawat's classification.
  • (18) So Fifa left that group out and went ahead with the draw – according to legend, plucking names from the Jules Rimet trophy itself – and, after Belgium were chosen but decided not to participate, Wales came out next.
  • (19) Now that growth hormone can be produced in almost unlimited quantities, clinicians face difficult new questions: How does one decide which short children should be treated?
  • (20) If we were to have a plebiscite before the end of the year, and you were to reverse-engineer that, it would make interesting speculation about the timing of an election.” Abetz said in January he would need to see whether a plebiscite was “above board or whether the question is stacked” before deciding to heed any result in favour of marriage equality.

Dictate


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To tell or utter so that another may write down; to inspire; to compose; as, to dictate a letter to an amanuensis.
  • (v. t.) To say; to utter; to communicate authoritatively; to deliver (a command) to a subordinate; to declare with authority; to impose; as, to dictate the terms of a treaty; a general dictates orders to his troops.
  • (v. i.) To speak as a superior; to command; to impose conditions (on).
  • (v. i.) To compose literary works; to tell what shall be written or said by another.
  • (v. t.) A statement delivered with authority; an order; a command; an authoritative rule, principle, or maxim; a prescription; as, listen to the dictates of your conscience; the dictates of the gospel.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It is my desperate hope that we close out of town.” In the book, God publishes his own 'It Getteth Better' video and clarifies his original writings on homosexuality: I remember dictating these lines to Moses; and afterward looking up to find him staring at me in wide-eyed astonishment, and saying, "Thou do knowest that when the Israelites read this, they're going to lose their fucking shit, right?"
  • (2) There are many examples to support his assertion, yet for the most part, it is celebrities who dictate what images can be published and what stories should be told.
  • (3) Dictated by underlying physicochemical constraints, deceived at times by the lulling tones of the siren entropy, and constantly vulnerable to the vagaries of other more pervasive forms of biological networking and information transfer encoded in the genes of virus and invading microorganisms, protein biorecognition in higher life forms, and particularly in mammals, represents the finely tuned molecular avenues for the genome to transfer its information to the next generation.
  • (4) In Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia – three countries that toppled three dictators nearly four years ago – 2014 marked something of a comeback for the concept of strongman leadership.
  • (5) Ernst had adopted conservative positions during the primary battle: she called the president a dictator and said the Environmental Protection Agency should be abolished.
  • (6) Some objected, saying we should not admit a dictator's son.
  • (7) A popular strain of foreign policy thought has long held that the US should be guided primarily by self-interest rather than human rights concerns: hence, since the US wants its Fifth Fleet to remain in Bahrain and believes ( with good reason ) that these dictators will serve US interests far better than if popular will in these countries prevails, it is right to prop up these autocrats.
  • (8) The "size principle" is known to dictate the sequence of recruitment of motor neurons during voluntary or reflex activation of muscles.
  • (9) Thus, cleavage site selection is likely to be dictated by specific noncovalent DNA-protein interactions.
  • (10) "Sometimes a handshake is just a handshake, but when the leader of the free world shakes the bloody hand of a ruthless dictator like Raúl Castro , it becomes a propaganda coup for the tyrant," said Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican Congress member in Florida, told the US secretary of state, John Kerry.
  • (11) Aldi is able to order this selection, more than 90% of which is own-label products, through bulk-buying, while dictating the package size in order to fit the maximum amount of goods on its shelves and lorries in order to keep costs low.
  • (12) This choice was made on the basis of a clinical and angiographic estimate of the possible consequences of vessel occlusion, or dictated by sound inoperability of the patient.
  • (13) This unusual nature dictates an enhanced awareness for proper management.
  • (14) said a colleague, referring to the former Chadian dictator, who had been living in gilded exile in Dakar since his overthrow in December 1990.
  • (15) North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un is also aware of the fate of other dictators who lacked nuclear weapons or were forced to give them up.
  • (16) Jason Kreis and the unremarkable success of Real Salt Lake Read more Kreis had built a serial playoff team in Salt Lake by defining a philosophical approach to the churning personnel turnover that the league’s roster-building restrictions tend to dictate.
  • (17) Combat conditions or mass casualty situations may dictate a delay in surgery because of higher priorities or lack of surgical facilities.
  • (18) So, logic would dictate that if Greeks are genuinely in favour of reform – and opinion polls have consistently shown wide support for many of the structural changes needed – they would be foolish to give these two parties another chance.
  • (19) Plibersek’s spokesman said on Friday: “Who is Mr Brandis to dictate the language on the Middle East peace negotiations?” The spokesman said the intervention this week amounted to “another foreign policy embarrassment for the Abbott government, which is why [Brandis] was forced by the foreign minister and the Foreign Affairs Department to rush out a statement about his inept pronouncements.” Labor ran into its own controversy earlier this year when Bill Shorten appeared to telegraph a shift in policy around the description of settlements in a major speech to the Zionist Federation of Australia.
  • (20) Killian Fox Growing your own: the basics What you decide to plant will be somewhat dictated by the space you have.