What's the difference between detest and disdain?

Detest


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To witness against; to denounce; to condemn.
  • (v. t.) To hate intensely; to abhor; to abominate; to loathe; as, we detest what is contemptible or evil.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Though no doubt he reviles Goldsmith’s racism, he doesn’t detest it quite enough to lend a hand to oust him.
  • (2) There is also Mario Draghi at the ECB, rambling on about quantitative easing , a policy that Berlin detests.
  • (3) Blackburn Rovers must be growing to detest the site of London.
  • (4) It may be “just a local vote”, political analyst Madani Cheurfa told the Observer , “but everything depends on how the Front National reacts and if Marine Le Pen manages to get the FN to speak with one voice.” Will Le Pen, head of the FN, be forced to echo the rivals she detests to show a united front against terrorism, as she did after the Charlie Hebdo killings in January?
  • (5) It featured – and then featured the end of – a new character, Uncle Steve, and banter between Rick (Roiland) and his detested son-in-law Jerry (Chris Parnell).
  • (6) Gay people have been pointlessly reminded, not that homophobia is unacceptable, but that there exist organised groups that detest them.
  • (7) But it's fair to say a fondness for sniping games marks me out as a coward who'd rather take potshots from a distance than actually climb down from the tree and enter the fray like a man, a theory backed up by the fact that while I love sniping, I detest "stealth games" (because it's scary when you get caught) and "boss fights" where you have to battle some gargantuan show-off 10 times your height who keeps knocking you on your arse with his tail.
  • (8) The injustice of the voting system demands people vote against their most detested option more determinedly than for their preferred party – until we get electoral reform.
  • (9) "Most journalists detest them, so they don't write about them seriously," Orrenius says.
  • (10) I didn’t know who all of these groups were and I detest any kind of hate group,” the Louisiana congressman told the Times-Picayune newspaper.
  • (11) "Dislike" is, in fact, far too mild: there's a depth of contempt, a cold ferocity of detestation, that can shock.
  • (12) Those who leave the left are often those who end up detesting it more: becoming a convert often means being more zealous than existing believers.
  • (13) They’ve got an agenda to pursue – against the very department they’re in.” Cash earmarked to help people in poor countries will instead be offered to middle-income giants like India and China As much as Patel and Oxley detest the aid-spending target, I cannot see them junking it – not when it was in the Tories’ last election manifesto.
  • (14) I accept fully that those opposed to this course of action share my detestation of Saddam.
  • (15) There was a culture of misogyny in some quarters, too, which I detested.
  • (16) We like everyone to be the same and if they are different we detest them," Delsol said.
  • (17) He detested Downside, the Benedictine public school, quaintly claiming that the headmaster had "set himself up in opposition to me".
  • (18) In 2005, he received his country’s highest civilian honour, the presidential medal of freedom, from George W Bush, an incumbent whose views he must have detested.
  • (19) Maliki, referencing the killing of a prominent cleric in Iraq in 1980, said Iraqis “strongly condemn these detestable sectarian practices and affirm that the crime of executing Sheikh al-Nimr will topple the Saudi regime as the crime of executing the martyr al-Sadr did to Saddam Hussein”.
  • (20) On 16 August 2007, Ridley rang an agent of the detested state to explore the possibility of a bailout.

Disdain


Definition:

  • (v. t.) A feeling of contempt and aversion; the regarding anything as unworthy of or beneath one; scorn.
  • (v. t.) That which is worthy to be disdained or regarded with contempt and aversion.
  • (v. t.) The state of being despised; shame.
  • (v. t.) To think unworthy; to deem unsuitable or unbecoming; as, to disdain to do a mean act.
  • (v. t.) To reject as unworthy of one's self, or as not deserving one's notice; to look with scorn upon; to scorn, as base acts, character, etc.
  • (v. i.) To be filled with scorn; to feel contemptuous anger; to be 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.