What's the difference between diabolical and evil?

Diabolical


Definition:

  • (a.) Pertaining to the devil; resembling, or appropriate, or appropriate to, the devil; devilish; infernal; impious; atrocious; nefarious; outrageously wicked; as, a diabolic or diabolical temper or act.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word 'fuck' would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden," Tynan said loftily, in the middle of a discussion about how sex could be represented on stage.
  • (2) The problem with the laws used to prosecute Dieudonné, Faurisson, Gollnisch and their diabolical kind is that it can, in a peculiar way, diminish our ability to argue against them.
  • (3) In a fierce attack Sunderland’s manager described the scheduling as “diabolical” and said the league was “destroying” the game.
  • (4) The launch of the new land trust follows a 10-year campaign by Citizens UK, the national charity for community organising.Smith said: "The London housing market is in a diabolical state and needs a radical change – and this is the most radical thing out there.
  • (5) He tried to capture its character – which he described as a “diabolical contraption, a dusty hunk of electric and mechanical hardware that reminded me of the disturbing 1950’s Quatermass science fiction television series” – in a near-lifesize two metre by three metre Portrait of a Dead Witch, which he also intended as a joke about the contemporary craze for computer-generated art.
  • (6) The established stable of political characters includes McKinnon’s diabolically hilarious Hillary Clinton , and Jay Pharoah’s precise, if unremarkable, take on Obama .
  • (7) Better still, he was out of the country for the entire year of the Iraq invasion, so he could at last allow his party to move on from Tony Blair's most diabolical decision, by making a belated confession to the catastrophe, which he could do without personal blushes.
  • (8) Abbott pointedly said that in 2009 – when he ousted Turnbull as Liberal leader – the Coalition was in “absolutely diabolical difficulty because we were making weak compromises with a bad government”.
  • (9) Comparing politically enthused democratic socialists to murderous paramilitaries employed by a genocidal totalitarian regime that slaughtered leftists: well, frankly, it’s diabolical.
  • (10) He was either a brilliant or a diabolical bandit – or possibly both – who captured territory throughout the Arabian peninsula and who in 1932 declared the establishment of Saudi Arabia, a nation named after a family.
  • (11) People fleeing from Syria are fleeing from the most diabolical circumstances.” The foreign minister said Australia was working with the UN refugee agency to ascertain asylum claims.
  • (12) The diabolical behavior, conversion symptoms, and diffuse violence and cruelty of a young woman responded remarkably to treatment with lithium.
  • (13) The ornate Hindu cave-temples at Ellora were "the most wonderful thing" he had seen in India, though "too diabolic to be beautiful".
  • (14) House of Cards, his second commissioned drama series whose first season was released in February, even better demonstrates Sarandos's diabolical genius (if that is what it is).
  • (15) "I fully support the money spent on the Olympic Stadium, but for it to be only used for a month before being demolished is a diabolical waste of public money."
  • (16) History suggests that there is no diabolical plot to keep women out.
  • (17) They went from a braying sort of swagger: ‘We’ve got this day won and the government’s in diabolical trouble’ to, like, ‘Oh shit, is that the time?
  • (18) The HIV and tuberculous infections therefore constitute a kind of "diabolical duo", the degree of endemia of one of these two diseases being influenced by the other and reciprocally.
  • (19) They described it as a "diabolic" act of "extreme brutality" and stressed what they said was a premeditated plan to murder the victim and a male friend by running them over after they were dumped, apparently unconscious, from the bus in which they had been assaulted.
  • (20) They’re likely to continue to support the Republicans so long as they believe that Democrats represent a diabolical threat to the nation.

Evil


Definition:

  • (a.) Having qualities tending to injury and mischief; having a nature or properties which tend to badness; mischievous; not good; worthless or deleterious; poor; as, an evil beast; and evil plant; an evil crop.
  • (a.) Having or exhibiting bad moral qualities; morally corrupt; wicked; wrong; vicious; as, evil conduct, thoughts, heart, words, and the like.
  • (a.) Producing or threatening sorrow, distress, injury, or calamity; unpropitious; calamitous; as, evil tidings; evil arrows; evil days.
  • (n.) Anything which impairs the happiness of a being or deprives a being of any good; anything which causes suffering of any kind to sentient beings; injury; mischief; harm; -- opposed to good.
  • (n.) Moral badness, or the deviation of a moral being from the principles of virtue imposed by conscience, or by the will of the Supreme Being, or by the principles of a lawful human authority; disposition to do wrong; moral offence; wickedness; depravity.
  • (n.) malady or disease; especially in the phrase king's evil, the scrofula.
  • (adv.) In an evil manner; not well; ill; badly; unhappily; injuriously; unkindly.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) King Salman of Saudi Arabia urged the redoubling of efforts to “eradicate this dangerous scourge and rid the world of its evils”.
  • (2) More evil than Clocky , the alarm clock that rolls away when you reach out to silence it, or the Puzzle Alarm , which makes you complete a simple puzzle before it'll go quiet, the Money Shredding Alarm Clock methodically destroys your cash unless you rouse yourself.
  • (3) To confront this evil – and defeat it, standing together for our values, for our security, for our prosperity.” Merkel gave a strong endorsement of Cameron’s reform strategy, saying that Britain’s demands were “not just understandable, but worthy of support”.
  • (4) "Our black, Muslim and Jewish citizens will sleep much less easily now the BBC has legitimised the BNP by treating its racist poison as the views of just another mainstream political party when it is so uniquely evil and dangerous."
  • (5) Richard now is presented, albeit somewhat inconsistently, as evil in response to social ostracism because of his ugly deformities.
  • (6) One view of these results stems from the belief that contraception is a necessary evil and the pill is the closest to a 'natural' sex act.
  • (7) Answer, citing Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” This is a very British suicide.
  • (8) So that you know he's evil, he is dressed like a giant, bedraggled grey duckling, in a fur coat made up of bits of chewed-up wolf.
  • (9) How World of Warcraft train future soldiers One odder digression sees the two discussing whether or not MMORPGs, video games like World of Warcraft, are evil.
  • (10) The deputy prime minister branded the treatment meted out to the four-year-old by his mother, Magdelena Luczak, and stepfather, Mariusz Krezolek, as evil and vile, but suggested it was up to the whole of society to stop such tragedies.
  • (11) We make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil.
  • (12) Questioned as to whether Google needs to alter its mission statement, which was twinned with the company mantra “don’t be evil, for the next stage of company growth in an interview with the Financial Times , Page responded: “We’re in a bit of uncharted territory.
  • (13) "I have been an evil witch, but now I can set light to the house and die happy."
  • (14) But at some point I realized that it's precisely because they continuously justify so much violence and aggression from their side that they have such a boundless compulsion to depict others as the Uniquely Primitive and Violent Evil.
  • (15) For here we see the depravity to which man can sink, the barbarity that unfolds when we begin to see our fellow human beings as somehow less than us, less worthy of dignity and life; we see how evil can, for a moment in time, triumph when good people do nothing."
  • (16) The US said it had removed North Korea – once a member of George Bush's axis of evil – from the terror list to breathe life into the stalled nuclear negotiations and would continue to pressure Pyongyang to resolve the abduction issue.
  • (17) As he described, with something approaching relish, the horrifying effect of a desperate eurozone willing to destroy the British economy, our industry and our society, purely to protect itself, I was reminded of the epic Last Judgement by John Martin, now in the Tate, which depicts the terrifying chaos as the good are separated from the evil damned.
  • (18) Channel One also branded Berezovsky an "evil genius," and a report on his demise quoted a senior member of the ruling United Russia , Vyacheslav Nikonov, saying he found it hard to believe the news was true.
  • (19) In recent months there have been series of protests against the intensifying campaign, with one Catholic leader denouncing the cross removals as an “evil act” .
  • (20) Time and again they said to me: ‘I knew I shouldn’t, but I had to weigh it up against what was happening, and it was the lesser of two evils.’ Years later many of these women are still ashamed of themselves.