What's the difference between edifice and edify?

Edifice


Definition:

  • (n.) A building; a structure; an architectural fabric; -- chiefly applied to elegant houses, and other large buildings; as, a palace, a church, a statehouse.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) But the condition of edifices such as B30 and B38 - and all the other "legacy" structures built at Sellafield decades ago - suggest Britain might end up paying a heavy price for this new commitment to nuclear energy.
  • (2) Speaking in Donetsk's Victoria hotel – a gleaming multistorey edifice next to the city's state-of-the-art Donbass football stadium – Taruta says he's confident presidential elections due on 25 May will take place.
  • (3) Second, the use of those feral financial balances to undermine currencies in pursuit of short-term gain and maximum income returns has brought the whole edifice to the point of breaking.
  • (4) They would see that their sacrifice has, paradoxically, contributed to their economic insecurity by allowing for a glut of money in trade surpluses to be built up in a banking system that has developed innovative techniques of financial engineering which only reward the plutocracy in corporate boardrooms and banks, and contribute to the instability of the economic edifice that delivers jobs and prosperity to the masses.
  • (5) But the edifice began crumbling very slowly right from the start.
  • (6) There are interior deserts, rain forests and 300-year-old ferns growing here, and the glass edifice – itself around since the 1840s –stands in Garfield Park , which has everything your 19th-21st century park goer could dream of: winding paths, sport fields, a pool and a pond.
  • (7) By the day, almost by the hour, the cracks in the edifice of modern tennis are widening.
  • (8) God save our gracious Queen”, even though I would get rid of her and the entire edifice upon which she stands as soon as possible.
  • (9) And this is why the US and the Swiss should set about dismantling the rotten edifice of Fifa – if only to show that when something is truly unacceptable, we refuse to accept it.
  • (10) In the business centre at the vast Gamescom exhibition in Cologne, Microsoft has its usual great green edifice – a rabbit warren of meeting rooms and break-out areas, with monitors showing endlessly rolling game trailers.
  • (11) The fact that this great stately edifice was constructed on Orkney, an island that has become a byword for remoteness, makes the site's discovery all the more remarkable.
  • (12) Immediately on assuming power, the chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, did away with the colour red in public edifices, and replaced it with blue and white.
  • (13) Only this time he is taking aim at the edifice of the political system that championed him.
  • (14) It is clear that empirical evidence will not persuade them to abandon an edifice that, as Milne points out, is built on such shaky ground that whatever fancy maths it involves, it is fundamentally worthless.
  • (15) The colossal complex sits near the centre of the small town, as large as several office blocks placed end to end, its white and yellow steel edifice dwarfing the sandstone tenements of Barrow Island.
  • (16) The first is complete, a brooding 140m-tall edifice by Zaha Hadid for the port's largest shipping company.
  • (17) It seemed sound, but if Greek default were followed by, say, the Irish, Portuguese and Spanish governments doing the same, and the euro collapsed, the consequent losses could eliminate the capital underwriting the entire banking edifice.
  • (18) The lawyers of Yangon could have done with a little divine intervention in their recent battle against the privatisation of the former high court and police commissioner’s office, a grand classical edifice whose ionic colonnade marches around an entire city block facing the waterfront on Strand Road.
  • (19) When every possible point has been made against the follies and failures of the EU, that cannot begin to match the Europhobes’ vast edifice of illusion, part of a pattern that stretches back years or centuries.
  • (20) On one side is the vast Victorian edifice of the McEwan Hall, a 2,000-seat auditorium that would make energy-efficiency experts go pale.

Edify


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To build; to construct.
  • (v. i.) To instruct and improve, especially in moral and religious knowledge; to teach.
  • (v. i.) To teach or persuade.
  • (v. i.) To improve.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The fact that the BBC does the popular ratings-chasing things as well as the edifying things has always been a key part of the public service brief.
  • (2) Yesterday Andy Murray finally won Wimbledon and climbed into the players' box to celebrate; Saturday on Centre Court was less edifying.
  • (3) 8.49pm GMT The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza has written a profile of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor that's sure to edify any serious Washington watcher.
  • (4) In the leader's office mistakes have been made, processes not followed, people excluded and details left unattended, and everyone will have their consequent un-Edifying moment, from bacon butties to posing with a copy of the Sun.
  • (5) Maybe it's guilt at our destruction of their habitats, the proliferation of internet-related animal cuteness or because there are parents keen to give their children something more edifying than Iron Man 3 .
  • (6) Mr Osborne's hero, a self-pitying, self-dramatising intellectual rebel who drives his wife away, takes a mistress and then drops her when his wife crawls back, will not be thought an edifying example of chivalry.
  • (7) The construction of clinical reality in German practice is distinctive and edifying for a cross-cultural understanding of medical systems of knowledge and praxis.
  • (8) The grisly spectacle of Muammar Gaddafi's death and posthumous career as Misrata's most popular body art exhibit may not have been very edifying, and news that the deposed dictator of Libya has been quietly buried at a secret desert location has to be welcome .
  • (9) In Nereis pelagica, graft of dorsal or ventral parts of a regenerate edified in the absence of nerve cord (=aneurogenic) on the ventral or dorsal face of a normal host demonstrates a completely dorsal nature of the body wall in these special regenerates.
  • (10) There’s Britishness and there’s Britishness, all of it authentic, much of it contradictory, not all of it edifying.
  • (11) Albania had entered the pitch to a predictable chorus of howls, whistles and things far less edifying – “Kill, kill the Albanian” and “Fuck, fuck Albania” were the soundtrack to the opening stages and a command-and-response routine of “Kosovo!” “Serbia!” between the east and west stands occupied much of the warm-up.
  • (12) But there is the less edifying explanation for why I'm here, which is that I looked at the list of past speakers, a remarkable list of the giants of global journalism – not just British hacks – with the series having been inaugurated by the legendary Ben Bradlee – and I could not resist being seen in their august company.
  • (13) Turkish history, however, is not littered with many edifying precedents.
  • (14) The opening scenes – the ones that made early news bulletins – were the least edifying.
  • (15) The vision of a prime minister, a future king and England's most recognised footballer prostrating themselves before Fifa's pseudo-papal state was never going to be edifying.
  • (16) The consequences of the three first-half pitch invasions that led to the match briefly being suspended will surely be less edifying.
  • (17) I agree with those who say that civil servants ought to be accountable if they make major blunders, but there has been nothing edifying about the way in which Ms May assigned culpability to officials before they had a chance to put their case.
  • (18) Frank admissions of loathing are always more edifying than PR guff for the credulous about brotherly love.
  • (19) It is certainly a less edifying view of the politicians involved, but it's a true view.
  • (20) The former chancellor told the Week in Westminster on BBC Radio 4: “The prime minister wouldn’t last 30 seconds if he lost the referendum and we’d be plunged into a Conservative leadership crisis which is never a very edifying sight.” The intervention by Clarke, whose frontbench career was revived by Cameron a year before the 2010 general election, will be seen by No 10 as particularly unhelpful.