What's the difference between dour and stern?

Dour


Definition:

  • (a.) Hard; inflexible; obstinate; sour in aspect; hardy; bold.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Reports from the scenes of Muslim Brotherhood and Freedom and Justice Party rallies conveyed a dour mood in Cairo, while active clashes were reported in both coastal cities and upper Egypt.
  • (2) There’s hard work and dour activities and that’s what I’m going to be doing.” Corbyn and his deputy, Tom Watson , are expected to make regular – and more public – visits to Scotland to help Scottish Labour avoid a further rout at next May’s Holyrood elections; the latest opinion polls suggest the SNP is on course to win a second successive overall majority with its approval ratings at more than 50%.
  • (3) However, as we watch Blade Runner , Deckard doesn’t feel like a replicant; he is dour and unengaged, but lacks his victims’ detached innocence, their staccato puzzlement at their own untrained feelings.
  • (4) Reith, “his dour handsome face scarred like that of a villain in a melodrama”, was “a strange shepherd for such a mixed, bohemian flock … he had under his aegis a bevy of ex-soldiers, ex-actors, ex-adventurers which … even a Dartmoor prison governor might have had difficulty in controlling”.
  • (5) The dour Zenawi could not resist a swipe at western pundits who had once written off Africa.
  • (6) A spectacular fall from grace on the pitch – from first to seventh, playing dour football that is anathema to fans who feasted on success throughout the Ferguson era – will also lead to renewed scrutiny of the club's controversial US owners, the Glazer family , away from it.
  • (7) The seafront was grey and almost deserted; outside the dour concrete venue, there was a single delegate having a blustery cigarette.
  • (8) But it was in westerns that Peck's dour integrity showed itself best: unshaven and tough in Yellow Sky (1948); a dude learning to adapt to the west in The Big Country (1958); and obsessively after the men who raped and killed his wife in The Bravados (1958).
  • (9) On Tuesday, the bunkhouse breakfast room felt like a hunting lodge, with wives and girlfriends serving meals while working-class men with beards, flannel shirts and dour expressions milled about.
  • (10) Milosevic himself, until then a dour and orthodox communist, appeared to realise his gift for rhetoric and the power of nationalism.
  • (11) Saki (Hector Hugh Munro, 1870-1916) was raised by his strict, dour aunts and grandmother, and was gay but closeted all his life – for good reason, since homosexual acts between men were still illegal.
  • (12) Fun is fun, and please don't try and stop people having fun, things are dour enough as it is."
  • (13) Because there is no ‘message’ – there’s just Jeremy!” Membership Event: Guardian Live | The future of Labour: meet the next leader By the end of the night, even the dour stewards were applauding.
  • (14) This late action made the preceding dour fare seem all the more disappointing.
  • (15) We were told he would be the dour, humourless lefty; and again he has been a challenge to expectations.
  • (16) We talk some more about Mad Men , about: "The swirl and sound and fury of it… For a show that is as dour and moody and pendulous as ours, we have fun."
  • (17) George averaged only 14.5 points and six rebounds in the first two games of the series and started slowly against on Friday before gathering pace in the dour encounter.
  • (18) The two TV presenters broadcasting from the crowd – she in a gold-spangled minidress and rigid curls, him dour in black tie – shot baleful looks in his direction as he carried on honking.
  • (19) Murray is a bit dour true to his Scottish nature but he is an excellent player.
  • (20) Jeremy Corbyn conceded that it would not be easy to revive Labour’s position in Scotland but promised “hard work and dour activities” as he made his first visit to the nation since his election as party leader.

Stern


Definition:

  • (n.) The black tern.
  • (superl.) Having a certain hardness or severity of nature, manner, or aspect; hard; severe; rigid; rigorous; austere; fixed; unchanging; unrelenting; hence, serious; resolute; harsh; as, a sternresolve; a stern necessity; a stern heart; a stern gaze; a stern decree.
  • (v. t.) The helm or tiller of a vessel or boat; also, the rudder.
  • (v. t.) The after or rear end of a ship or other vessel, or of a boat; the part opposite to the stem, or prow.
  • (v. t.) Fig.: The post of management or direction.
  • (v. t.) The hinder part of anything.
  • (v. t.) The tail of an animal; -- now used only of the tail of a dog.
  • (a.) Being in the stern, or being astern; as, the stern davits.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Tap the relevant details into Google, though, and the real names soon appear before your eyes: the boss in question, stern and yet oddly quixotic, is Phyllis Westberg of Harold Ober Associates.
  • (2) Biomass and crops for animals are as damaging as [burning] fossil fuels.” The recommendation follows advice last year that a vegetarian diet was better for the planet from Lord Nicholas Stern , former adviser to the Labour government on the economics of climate change.
  • (3) Quenching of intrinsic fluorescence of (Ca2+-Mg2+)-ATPase by acrylamide, performed in the presence of Ca2+, gave evidence for a single class of tryptophan residues with Stern-Volmer constant (KSV) of 10 M-1.
  • (4) The death of your battery is now one of the factors that will push you to upgrade.” As Joanna Stern put it in her review of the iPhone 6s in the Wall Street Journal: “The No 1 thing people want in a smartphone is better battery life.
  • (5) Before we meet, I have to have a stern talk with myself about not mentioning the game last August in which all Arsenal fans will contend that Barton got new signing Gervinho sent off on his debut; he's had similarly abrasive encounters since with fellow midfielders, Karl Henry from Wolves and Norwich's Bradley Johnson, the latter earning him a three-match ban.
  • (6) Heshel Melamed, a stern rabbinical paterfamilias, was his maternal grandfather.
  • (7) Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire.
  • (8) The influential economist, Lord Nicholas Stern, welcomed the proposal as "strong and reasonable" and "with the interests of developing countries at its heart".
  • (9) Tryptophanyl fluorescence of the lipoprotein assembly was quenched as indicated by a reduction in the effective Stern-Volmer constant.
  • (10) "There's funding that was agreed to as part of the Copenhagen accord, and as a general matter, the US is going to use its funds to go to countries that have indicated an interest to be part of the accord," the state department envoy, Todd Stern, told the Washington Post.
  • (11) 3.43am BST Spurs 57-56 Heat - 6:15 remaining, 3rd quarter And some thoughts via email from Daniel Vazquez-Paluch: I can't help wondering if LeBron is a victim of Stern's rule changes more than his own tendency to disappear.
  • (12) It "failed to recognise the significance" of damage to a gas fracking well in 2011 and did not report it to government officials for six months, leading to a stern reprimand by the energy minister, papers released under the Freedom of Information Act show.
  • (13) Treatment with chymotrypsin to block the E1 to E2 transition results in a new set of quenching parameters which are unchanged with Na or K. Even after detergent denaturation (1% sodium dodecyl sulfate for 30 min), Stern-Volmer plots are nonlinear, and a significant fraction of tryptophan residues remain inaccessible to quencher.
  • (14) (At the time, he told shockjock Howard Stern on the record that he approved of it.)
  • (15) The local undertakers were pleased to discover the great Henty to be the man they had always imagined - a full-bearded giant, stern and wise, dressed like a warrior hero or - much the same thing - a Victorian gentleman with the whiff of gunpowder and the clash of sabres about him.
  • (16) At low quencher concentrations, the quenching follows the classical Stern-Volmer law.
  • (17) A couple of times I’ve raised my voice, been stern and they’ve responded.
  • (18) Quenching of pyrene fluorescence emission of labeled ATPase by acrylamide and cesium chloride gave linear Stern-Volmer plots.
  • (19) In a wide-ranging news conference at the end of the G7 summit in the Wetterstein Mountains in Germany, Obama issued a stern warning against Russia, accepted praise for the work of US prosecutors at confronting corruption in world soccer, gave the US supreme court advice on how to rule in an upcoming healthcare case and defended his immigration policies.
  • (20) Orthodontic treatment in those days, like life in general, was simple and stern.