What's the difference between evil and vile?

Evil


Definition:

  • (a.) Having qualities tending to injury and mischief; having a nature or properties which tend to badness; mischievous; not good; worthless or deleterious; poor; as, an evil beast; and evil plant; an evil crop.
  • (a.) Having or exhibiting bad moral qualities; morally corrupt; wicked; wrong; vicious; as, evil conduct, thoughts, heart, words, and the like.
  • (a.) Producing or threatening sorrow, distress, injury, or calamity; unpropitious; calamitous; as, evil tidings; evil arrows; evil days.
  • (n.) Anything which impairs the happiness of a being or deprives a being of any good; anything which causes suffering of any kind to sentient beings; injury; mischief; harm; -- opposed to good.
  • (n.) Moral badness, or the deviation of a moral being from the principles of virtue imposed by conscience, or by the will of the Supreme Being, or by the principles of a lawful human authority; disposition to do wrong; moral offence; wickedness; depravity.
  • (n.) malady or disease; especially in the phrase king's evil, the scrofula.
  • (adv.) In an evil manner; not well; ill; badly; unhappily; injuriously; unkindly.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) King Salman of Saudi Arabia urged the redoubling of efforts to “eradicate this dangerous scourge and rid the world of its evils”.
  • (2) More evil than Clocky , the alarm clock that rolls away when you reach out to silence it, or the Puzzle Alarm , which makes you complete a simple puzzle before it'll go quiet, the Money Shredding Alarm Clock methodically destroys your cash unless you rouse yourself.
  • (3) To confront this evil – and defeat it, standing together for our values, for our security, for our prosperity.” Merkel gave a strong endorsement of Cameron’s reform strategy, saying that Britain’s demands were “not just understandable, but worthy of support”.
  • (4) "Our black, Muslim and Jewish citizens will sleep much less easily now the BBC has legitimised the BNP by treating its racist poison as the views of just another mainstream political party when it is so uniquely evil and dangerous."
  • (5) Richard now is presented, albeit somewhat inconsistently, as evil in response to social ostracism because of his ugly deformities.
  • (6) One view of these results stems from the belief that contraception is a necessary evil and the pill is the closest to a 'natural' sex act.
  • (7) Answer, citing Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” This is a very British suicide.
  • (8) So that you know he's evil, he is dressed like a giant, bedraggled grey duckling, in a fur coat made up of bits of chewed-up wolf.
  • (9) How World of Warcraft train future soldiers One odder digression sees the two discussing whether or not MMORPGs, video games like World of Warcraft, are evil.
  • (10) The deputy prime minister branded the treatment meted out to the four-year-old by his mother, Magdelena Luczak, and stepfather, Mariusz Krezolek, as evil and vile, but suggested it was up to the whole of society to stop such tragedies.
  • (11) We make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil.
  • (12) Questioned as to whether Google needs to alter its mission statement, which was twinned with the company mantra “don’t be evil, for the next stage of company growth in an interview with the Financial Times , Page responded: “We’re in a bit of uncharted territory.
  • (13) "I have been an evil witch, but now I can set light to the house and die happy."
  • (14) But at some point I realized that it's precisely because they continuously justify so much violence and aggression from their side that they have such a boundless compulsion to depict others as the Uniquely Primitive and Violent Evil.
  • (15) For here we see the depravity to which man can sink, the barbarity that unfolds when we begin to see our fellow human beings as somehow less than us, less worthy of dignity and life; we see how evil can, for a moment in time, triumph when good people do nothing."
  • (16) The US said it had removed North Korea – once a member of George Bush's axis of evil – from the terror list to breathe life into the stalled nuclear negotiations and would continue to pressure Pyongyang to resolve the abduction issue.
  • (17) As he described, with something approaching relish, the horrifying effect of a desperate eurozone willing to destroy the British economy, our industry and our society, purely to protect itself, I was reminded of the epic Last Judgement by John Martin, now in the Tate, which depicts the terrifying chaos as the good are separated from the evil damned.
  • (18) Channel One also branded Berezovsky an "evil genius," and a report on his demise quoted a senior member of the ruling United Russia , Vyacheslav Nikonov, saying he found it hard to believe the news was true.
  • (19) In recent months there have been series of protests against the intensifying campaign, with one Catholic leader denouncing the cross removals as an “evil act” .
  • (20) Time and again they said to me: ‘I knew I shouldn’t, but I had to weigh it up against what was happening, and it was the lesser of two evils.’ Years later many of these women are still ashamed of themselves.

Vile


Definition:

  • (superl.) Low; base; worthless; mean; despicable.
  • (superl.) Morally base or impure; depraved by sin; hateful; in the sight of God and men; sinful; wicked; bad.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Those behind it have once again taken the law into their own hands and dispensed a vile form of rough justice.
  • (2) The deputy prime minister branded the treatment meted out to the four-year-old by his mother, Magdelena Luczak, and stepfather, Mariusz Krezolek, as evil and vile, but suggested it was up to the whole of society to stop such tragedies.
  • (3) Charlie Morris described the column as "vile and disgusting", adding that she hoped the writer "gets the sack".
  • (4) In China, where the Communist party has always determined which news is fit to print, authorities have ordered internet portals to abandon original reporting on political or social topics because of its “ extremely vile effect ”.
  • (5) The massacre was not committed by "the Poles" against "the Jews", but was a vile crime committed by specific individuals.
  • (6) Daryush 'Roosh V' Valizadeh cancels neo-masculinist meetings over safety Read more Roosh and company encountered such uniform hostility because their views are ostentatiously vile.
  • (7) Much porn is samey and some is utterly vile, full of torture, faeces, urine, vomit and blood and the utter degradation of women who become nothing but a series of orifices.
  • (8) Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn claimed the results so far illustrated that the Conservatives’ “vile campaign” had backfired .
  • (9) This whole vile outpouring may just be par for the course in the wilds of social media.
  • (10) I did, though, have my suspicions that the perpetrator of this vile assault was Dolge Orlick, Joe's journeyman apprentice.
  • (11) The description “whorephobic” is usually reserved for feminists who speak or campaign against the liberalisation of the laws on sex work, who dream of a world where this huge, vile industry doesn’t exist.
  • (12) It is true in both cases that secrecy helps to protect some truly vile criminals, terrorists and paedophiles.
  • (13) It was not that he could not play good guys; rather that he excelled at locating the virtues in the apparently vile.
  • (14) Jowell said: "Harriet Harman would have nothing to do with the vile rubbish of an organisation like PIE," adding: "I don't want anyone to think this present frenzy about Harriet, the NCCL and the Daily Mail attack on her is in any way explained by that was then and this is now."
  • (15) Last year the country's most senior judge said only "extremely vile criminals" were executed in 2007 as a result of "kill fewer, kill carefully" reforms that gave the supreme court the right to overturn capital sentences handed down by lower courts.
  • (16) You need locking up.” Vardy posted a screenshot of the threats with the words “shocking and vile”.
  • (17) "That is why I believe George Osborne's calculated decision to use the shocking and vile crimes of Mick Philpott to advance a political argument is the cynical act of a desperate chancellor.
  • (18) Vile stuff – but the Nazi attitude to modern art may have been radically misunderstood.
  • (19) "They will not further any aim or objective by their vile and callous deeds.
  • (20) Vile returned to Philadelphia and enrolled at a community college.

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