What's the difference between dumb and silly?

Dumb


Definition:

  • (a.) Destitute of the power of speech; unable; to utter articulate sounds; as, the dumb brutes.
  • (a.) Not willing to speak; mute; silent; not speaking; not accompanied by words; as, dumb show.
  • (a.) Lacking brightness or clearness, as a color.
  • (v. t.) To put to silence.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Cheers, then, to an apparent alliance of the NME, a few people in London's trendy E1 district and some dumb young musicians, because "New Rave" is upon us, and there is apparently no stopping it.
  • (2) Four brain smears from dogs which died of dumb rabies were positive for Negri bodies while two brain smears obtained from dogs which died of the furious form of rabies were negative.
  • (3) The court heard that MP responded to Nimmo's message of "Dumb blonde bitch" with the message "That's dumb Dr blonde bitch to you".
  • (4) At the moment, most of our electricity and gas meters are dumb, analogue devices: they record your consumption and someone comes round periodically to take a reading.
  • (5) We now show by immunoelectron microscopy that Fab fragments of a desmin-specific monoclonal antibody mixed with the rod lead to dumb-bell-shaped structures.
  • (6) On admission, a dumb-bell type huge tumor with the destruction of the orbital roof was demonstrated on CT scan and MRI.
  • (7) The non-solid bacilli were further classified on the basis of their morphology to the following forms:-- (a) short but evenly stained (b) indented (c) beaded (d) dumb-bell shaped (e) coccoid and (f) fragmented.
  • (8) In an ideal world, such findings might be interpreted as smart women making smart choices, but instead it seems that this research is just adding fuel to the argument that women who don't have children, regardless of the reason, are not just selfish losers but dumb ones as well.
  • (9) Large granules, 160 nm in diameter, already reported in the ITP (KEMALI 1977a), are also shown as well as tiny flat mixed with large flat dense core vesicles of dumb-bell shape.
  • (10) Critics accused the BBC of dumbing down when Kirsty Young replaced Sue Lawley as host of Desert Island Discs, while t he dismissal of Ed Stourton from the Today presenting team was executed shambolically , with the presenter learning his fate from a rival news organisation rather than his bosses.
  • (11) As in canine rabies there are furious and dumb forms of the disease.
  • (12) Charlie Hebdo was launched by a group of "non-conformists" who had previously run a monthly called Hara Kiri (whose subtitle read: "dumb and nasty").
  • (13) He might have been born with a silver spoon and declared bankruptcy four or five times but he is not dumb.
  • (14) A GST on fresh food is an exceptionally dumb strategy in the midst of an obesity crisis | Catherine King Read more Labor said that much of that money would go towards compensating lower income earners, leaving little money for other services.
  • (15) Dumb rabies and cysticerci in dogs being sold to people in rural communities pose potential public health hazards.
  • (16) In a blog published on Friday afternoon entitled "My teenage mistakes" , Weldon said his year-long flirtation would have remained the embarrassing stuff of his youth had he not a few years later done what he described as a "dumb thing" and boasted about his past in an Oxford student newspaper.
  • (17) Mitt's now trying to rebut the "Let Detroit go bankrupt" line o argument, which is dumb.
  • (18) The internet of things is the idea of creating a home where everything is connected to the internet, creating “swarm intelligence” from individually dumb devices.
  • (19) Gove launched an all-out attack on the "educational establishment", claiming it suffered from "defeatism, political correctness and the entrenched culture of dumbing down".
  • (20) "We will tackle head-on the defeatism, the political correctness and the entrenched culture of dumbing down that is at the heart of our educational establishment."

Silly


Definition:

  • (n.) Happy; fortunate; blessed.
  • (n.) Harmless; innocent; inoffensive.
  • (n.) Weak; helpless; frail.
  • (n.) Rustic; plain; simple; humble.
  • (n.) Weak in intellect; destitute of ordinary strength of mind; foolish; witless; simple; as, a silly woman.
  • (n.) Proceeding from want of understanding or common judgment; characterized by weakness or folly; unwise; absurd; stupid; as, silly conduct; a silly question.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) We just hope that … maybe she’s gone to see her friend, talk some sense into her,” Renu said, adding that Shamima “knew that it was a silly thing to do” and that she did not know why her friend had done it.
  • (2) And Myers is cautioned after a silly block 3.21am GMT 54 mins Besler with a long-throw for SKC but it's cleared.
  • (3) As if to prove her silly dilettantism, when a journalist asked Dasha about her favourite artists, she replied, "I'm, like, really bad at remembering names."
  • (4) Some of them, pulled together for the manifesto, are silly, or doomed, or simply there for shock value - information points in the form of holograms of Dixon of Dock Green, the legalisation of soft drugs, official brothels opposite Westminster, complete with division bells.
  • (5) I am of a similar vintage and, like many friends and fans of the series, bemoan the fact that we are generally treated by society as silly, weak, daft, soppy, prejudiced (even bigoted), risk-averse and wary of new situations.
  • (6) I had more fun with Matt Winning , delivering a silly set on the Free Fringe imagining himself the son of Robert Mugabe.
  • (7) Facebook Twitter Pinterest In an essay for the Hollywood Reporter, Camille Paglia writes that Swift promotes a ‘silly, regressive public image’.
  • (8) His selection on Twitter, he added, was “all in no particular order, off the top of my head, and the most incomplete of lists”, put together in response to Talese’s “silliness”.
  • (9) As soon as they saw how serious it was, they switched from being my silly, fun friends into being the most reliable and amazing people.
  • (10) They were all young, and it was a party house, devoted to games of hide and seek, music, silly practical jokes and food fights in the drawing room.
  • (11) As a result, one or two wrote some rather silly things in their reports,” Wilshaw said.
  • (12) ‘Silly things said by a silly man’ To be honest I really don’t care what BoJo says.
  • (13) People usually don't make silly, careless mistakes when they're motivated and working in a positive environment.
  • (14) Watching “our lads” pretending to mouth questionable lyrics about God giving the Queen near-immortal life, and her being the victor when she’s not really of fighting age, is silly.
  • (15) Imagine my relief this week then, when I found out that I can now let go of all my silly gay politics.
  • (16) We have referees who are unfamiliar with that silly "Goaltender Interference" technicality.
  • (17) The syndrome he described--a psychosis of early onset with a deteriorating course characterized by a "silly" affect, behavioral peculiarities, and formal thought disorder--not only adumbrated Kraepelin's generic category of dementia praecox but quite specifically defined the later subtype of hebephrenic, or disorganized, schizophrenia as well.
  • (18) "But they're so silly that I must say I never found them intimidating."
  • (19) Just as certain songs become inextricably associated in our minds with certain eras (before the invention of iPods, that is, after which everyone could walk around every day with all the songs in the world on shuffle), so too do silly trends.
  • (20) In 2014, she began working as a writer at Late Night with Seth Meyers; her first standup spot on that show began with a joke that typified both her silliness and confidence.