What's the difference between dour and tenacious?

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.

Tenacious


Definition:

  • (a.) Holding fast, or inclined to hold fast; inclined to retain what is in possession; as, men tenacious of their just rights.
  • (a.) Apt to retain; retentive; as, a tenacious memory.
  • (a.) Having parts apt to adhere to each other; cohesive; tough; as, steel is a tenacious metal; tar is more tenacious than oil.
  • (a.) Apt to adhere to another substance; glutinous; viscous; sticking; adhesive.
  • (a.) Niggardly; closefisted; miserly.
  • (a.) Holding stoutly to one's opinion or purpose; obstinate; stubborn.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The insurgency is still raging, and the president will have to inspire the security forces, choose generals to lead the fight, and plot tactics to beat a tenacious and experienced enemy.
  • (2) RSL trying to get their own flowing passing game going now, but the Timbers looking tenacious in midfield to break it up.
  • (3) Another factor is the decline of caste, the tenacious Indian social hierarchy which still determines the status of hundreds of millions.
  • (4) A tenacious Anabaena epiphyte was also discovered inhabiting the surfaces of root nodules.
  • (5) His family belonged to the Ghanchi caste, low down on the tenacious social hierarchy that still often defines status in India, and had little money.
  • (6) Another facilitating factor which is discussed is that blowing the nose may catch tenacious mucus which has partly passed through the ostium by the ciliary activity in the sinus.
  • (7) Malta continued to defend tenaciously after half-time and Italy struggled to create openings, despite their overwhelming dominance.
  • (8) However, attempts to cultivate M phi for morphological and functional studies have often been compromised because M phi adhere rapidly and tenaciously to cultureware.
  • (9) The exudate, apparent as early as 48 hours after inoculation, drained from the cervix as a tenacious, mucopurulent discharge for several days, then rapidly disappeared.
  • (10) Thirty-four patients, 21 male and 13 female, with chronic asthma and tenacious mucoid expectoration were studied regarding clinical parameters, PEF, airway resistance and sputum viscosity measured according to the n.m.r.
  • (11) Mark Lewis and Charlotte Harris, two tenacious solicitors, were followed around, together with their children.
  • (12) The cholla cacti are particularly tenacious in the manner in which the spines stay embedded in the skin.
  • (13) The action of complement is considered in terms of a more tenacious bond formed between effector and target cells.
  • (14) Two immunologically distinct proteins of 55 and 26 kd, which are tenaciously, but noncovalently associated with Oxytricha macronuclear DNA termini, have been purified.
  • (15) So they fought tenaciously, first over prices and then over privatisation.
  • (16) But the Justice Department attorney Ron Wiltsie, who impugned Xenakis’s credentials in tenacious cross-examination, said Dhiab had committed “five assaults since April 2014”.
  • (17) The observation that glucose phosphates bind to the Li+ complex of phosphoglucomutase some 900 times more tenaciously than to the corresponding Mg2+ complex could provide a partial rationale for the lack of reactivity of the Le+ form of the enzyme.
  • (18) "For rural areas, farmers, dalits (those at the bottom of India's tenacious social hierarchy), weak and the pained, this government is for them.
  • (19) [Small Talk, like the all-action investigative journalist that it is, tenaciously refuses to let the question go] And you're other half, she's an Irish pool international?
  • (20) Isis will then be reduced to what it once was: a very brutal and tenacious Iraqi militant organisation.