What's the difference between dirty and sordid?

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.

Sordid


Definition:

  • (a.) Filthy; foul; dirty.
  • (a.) Vile; base; gross; mean; as, vulgar, sordid mortals.
  • (a.) Meanly avaricious; covetous; niggardly.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Haki's naivety about English detective fiction is more than matched by Latimer's ingenuous excitement as Haki describes to him Dimitrios's sordid career, and he decides it would be fun to write the gangster's biography.
  • (2) It might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning."
  • (3) Scarcely a day goes by without another apology for past failures, another gimmicky new policy, another sordid attempt to grab headlines.
  • (4) A former police officer is less complimentary: "The clientele in these places are by definition pretty sordid, highly manipulative and sleazy," he says.
  • (5) As Margarito and Inez argue over what really happened that day in Culiacan, it seems that they are no longer describing yet another sordid killing in the endless war on drugs.
  • (6) How could any organisation survive the sordid revelations that emerged at the Leveson inquiry, costing the Murdoch empire millions in compensation and legal fees, along with the closure of a flagship title?
  • (7) He recalled the stench and listening to the screams of others echoing through their sordid dungeon.
  • (8) The "titillating details" of the "sordid affairs" of the Anna Nicole saga "enticed" Bahamians and changed the face of the island's politics, two confidential memos sent by the embassy in Nassau reveal.
  • (9) "Of all the sites, it was the most depressing and slightly sordid," she says, "while other places often had an air of melancholy or seemed slightly otherworldly at dawn.
  • (10) Wilde takes no prisoners from the very outset: “The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others.” It’s a very Wildean, quasi-epigrammatic reversal – the reader expects something worthy, collectivist and altruistic, instead he gets something that’s irreverent, individualistic and apparently selfish.
  • (11) To begin with, it was a different kind of image problem: in Georgian society gin was considered rackety and sordid, not fusty and old-fashioned as it was in the swinging 60s.
  • (12) Often only one – and sometimes no – carriage door would open when they pulled into a station, and in summer they were “cooled” only by the methodical sweep of a begrimed metal fan that just pushed the sordid air about.
  • (13) The principle is a simple one: it involves national resources going into education, health and housing, instead of being siphoned off into the offshore accounts of the super-rich or squandered on sordid overseas conflicts, instigated by the inadequate for the profit of their paymasters.
  • (14) In her 1963 novel A Summer Birdcage , Margaret Drabble’s narrator Sarah describes a “loathsome flat” in the King’s Road, Chelsea, and an “unspeakably sordid” place in Highgate.
  • (15) Again, my first instinct is that they must have been rubbernecking, the sordid allegations having made HRH a rather grim sort of draw, or at the very least not as ferociously dull and pointless as the rest of the apres-ski programme .
  • (16) One letter said: "Will some evil person leak the entire proceedings and all the sordid details so that the irresponsible global media … can really get their teeth into them?"
  • (17) Two years ago, in a joint interview with Ruth Rendell, the writers were asked by a Daily Telegraph reporter, "how two respectable, middle-class ladies" could be involved in the "sordid world of crime fiction?"
  • (18) At the same time, the cable adds, the "titillating details of Anna Nicole's sordid affairs have enticed the Bahamian public to give renewed focus to government indiscretions".
  • (19) This is a potentially serious point, seeing as to require any priest to solemnise what he believes to be sordid would be to mandate hypocrisy and thereby demean the prospective services.
  • (20) But the release of three separate reports on Friday; from the Metropolitan police and the NSPCC, the Crown Prosecution Service and from Surrey police, has shed harsh light on what Commander Peter Spindler of Scotland Yard labelled a sordid tale of a larger than figure who had "groomed the nation".