What's the difference between dirty and nasty?

Dirty


Definition:

  • (superl.) Defiled with dirt; foul; nasty; filthy; not clean or pure; serving to defile; as, dirty hands; dirty water; a dirty white.
  • (superl.) Sullied; clouded; -- applied to color.
  • (superl.) Sordid; base; groveling; as, a dirty fellow.
  • (superl.) Sleety; gusty; stormy; as, dirty weather.
  • (v. t.) To foul; to make filthy; to soil; as, to dirty the clothes or hands.
  • (v. t.) To tarnish; to sully; to scandalize; -- said of reputation, character, etc.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In platform shoes to emulate Johnson's height, and with the aid of prosthetic earlobes, Cranston becomes the 36th president: he bullies and cajoles, flatters and snarls and barks, tells dirty jokes or glows with idealism as required, and delivers the famous "Johnson treatment" to everyone from Martin Luther King to the racist Alabama governor George Wallace.
  • (2) You won’t read about this in adverts for “feminine hygiene” (because of course having periods makes us dirty).
  • (3) But the president said that the rest of the country had relied for too long on police to do the “dirty work” of containing urban violence and bore responsibility for the violent spectacle in Baltimore.
  • (4) But the other brother did not want to get his hands dirty with the regime and would have nothing.
  • (5) As one source close to the inquiry put it: “There was a hell of a lot of dirty stuff going on.” Two earlier Yard inquiries had failed to investigate the relevant notes in Mulcaire’s logs.
  • (6) Facebook Twitter Pinterest A bus belching smoke in Bogotá Pretty dirty.
  • (7) Source: Reuters Dirty old river If the notion of an Englishman’s castle as his home is being challenged on the Levels, where scores of properties flooded, the bursting of the Thames from its banks a few hundred yards from the royal castle of Windsor has raised the issue to a new height.
  • (8) The most characteristic microscopic features of the ovarian metastases were garland and cribriform growth patterns, intraluminal "dirty" necrosis, segmental destruction of glands, and absence of squamous metaplasia.
  • (9) Everyone has been part of it, regardless of whether you’re a dirty metalhead or a flamboyant pop fan.” • This article was amended on 1 June 2017.
  • (10) When my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and white... Further - and this is a stroke of his sensitive, pawky genius - he contemplates his momentarily displaced furniture and the nuance of enchanting strangeness: It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy's pack, and my three-legged table, from which I did not remove the books and pen and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories ...
  • (11) But Gates’s decision to “bump off from art” and live “in the sphere of dirt, the dirty, the stuff that we think is in the ground” was revelatory, leading to invitations to Davos and a TED Talk, where he talked about how he revived a neighborhood with imagination and hard graft .
  • (12) I would like it to always look as fresh as the day I made it, so part of the contract is: if the glass breaks, we mend it; if the tank gets dirty, we clean it; if the shark rots, we find you a new shark."
  • (13) You fight a dirty war with innovations.” Rawat expressed frustration about the pressures faced by his soldiers, required to police their own citizens in an environment the Indian government has described as “warlike”.
  • (14) The results of both tests are compared with those of the in vitro test (with the disinfectant diluted in distilled water, in water of standardized hardness, and in a 0.2% albumin solution), those of the European suspension test under clean and under dirty conditions, and those of four practical tests (the AFNOR test, the DGHM test, the QCT and the QSDT).
  • (15) O'Hagan's LRB piece is no part of an organised dirty tricks campaign.
  • (16) 5) Playing dirty helps win the day Three days before the vote, a panicking no campaign organised a last-ditch rally at the Place du Canada in Montreal.
  • (17) There's dirty politics, dirty money and dirty dealings.
  • (18) "Dreaming only of sleep and a sip of tea, the exhausted, harassed and dirty convict becomes obedient putty in the hands of the administration, which sees us solely as a free work force.
  • (19) Last year in a Radar accessible toilet I discovered a dirty syringe in the bowl.
  • (20) It is dirty and it is cold, he can’t even have a shower.

Nasty


Definition:

  • (superl.) Offensively filthy; very dirty, foul, or defiled; disgusting; nauseous.
  • (superl.) Hence, loosely: Offensive; disagreeable; unpropitious; wet; drizzling; as, a nasty rain, day, sky.
  • (superl.) Characterized by obcenity; indecent; indelicate; gross; filthy.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) How does it stack up against the competition – and are there any nasties in the small print?
  • (2) Admirably, Clinton kept her cool throughout, particularly Trump when spoke over her to call her “such a nasty woman”.
  • (3) He wanted to stay on longer than the traditional retirement age but became involved in a nasty spat with the then-chairman, Peter Sutherland.
  • (4) It is the latest attack on the government from the Hungarian economist, whose previous criticism of David Cameron's "nasty" looking restrictions on benefits for foreigners led the angry prime minister to lodge a formal complaint.
  • (5) Protesters waved banners with slogans such as “Special relationship, just say no” and “Nasty women unite”.
  • (6) The examples I have quoted are the tip of a very large and very nasty iceberg.
  • (7) In short, it is alleged that under his rule Sri Lanka is becoming a nasty, authoritarian quasi-rogue banana republic.
  • (8) Patterson agrees that it’s all much more controlled now, but she also wonders whether at times the media can be too negative, doomy, and sometimes downright nasty.
  • (9) And I’m sorry, that will come before any internal party-political issue and I think I should be able to adopt that position without being attacked, without being subject to a nasty troll-form of politics.” On Tuesday the prime minister, David Cameron, promised to publish a comprehensive strategy on Syria in the form of a written response to a report by the foreign affairs select committee, which concluded that the government had failed to make the case for extending airstrikes.
  • (10) Al-Azhar, the Sunni Muslim world’s leading centre of Islamic learning, called on Muslims to “ignore the nasty frivolity” of the latest edition.
  • (11) He was followed by Theresa May, who 13 years ago had warned that many voters thought the Conservatives were the “nasty party”, but who now pledged to clamp down on the rights of asylum seekers, and renewed her commitment to cut net migration to below 100,000 in terms so harsh that she was widely condemned even by her allies.
  • (12) I think it probably gave me a sense of self and self-protection that has been very useful, and I possibly have had less nasty moments than a lot of other women.
  • (13) Dr Rosemary Gillespie was the object of a “nasty, vindictive and sustained campaign of bullying” from her second day in the job at the UK’s biggest HIV charity, the tribunal heard.
  • (14) It had a “flat, nasty” ring to it, she says, which she has since “analysed like a Rubik’s cube; I have turned it every which way.
  • (15) Updated at 2.10pm BST 1.47pm BST Over to America, where the latest productivity figures confirm that the US economy took a nasty jolt over the winter, when bad weather gripped the country.
  • (16) It doesn't have to be bloody, it doesn't have to be nasty, but it does have to be fought."
  • (17) That was the one surprise in the budget – apart from the fine print of the nasties.
  • (18) Because the nastiness on our doorstep has piled too high for too long, and I just want to get out of the house.
  • (19) Southampton 3-0 Vitesse | Europa League third qualifying round match report Read more Even more damagingly for West Ham, they lost Enner Valencia to a potentially nasty knee injury in the first half after he caught his leg in the turf.
  • (20) They orginally had lofty ambitions of talking about the economy but since they have lost that argument so catastrophically, they have reached for the Ukip playbook to create fictitious stories to scare people about immigrants and release video nasties about Turkish people”.