What's the difference between evil and villainy?

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.

Villainy


Definition:

  • (n.) The quality or state of being a villain, or villainous; extreme depravity; atrocious wickedness; as, the villainy of the seducer.
  • (n.) Abusive, reproachful language; discourteous speech; foul talk.
  • (n.) The act of a villain; a deed of deep depravity; a crime.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) A quick graze of the internet will provide fan theories to feed any hunches you’ve long felt about the happy-go-lucky companionship of Timon and Pumbaa, and their effective adoption of baby Simba, in The Lion King – or indeed the foppish villainy of the same film’s Scar, an alpha lion who has never found a mate in the pride.
  • (2) He can detect villainy in a stream of water trickling down a gutter, in the hiss of a sprinkler, in the greenness of a lawn.
  • (3) Photograph: Allstar Calvin J Candie – Django Unchained There's nothing as effective as a smooth-talking devil when it comes to villainy, and Leonardo DiCaprio pulls just the right amount of oily charm out of the bastard bag here to match his mephistophelean beard.
  • (4) Every act of villainy Michael can conceive of, Janine has already accomplished, and picked her teeth with the bones of her victims.
  • (5) Navarro’s accusations against Murdoch outlets inserted a sub-plot into the conventional Trumpian narrative about Chinese villainy.
  • (6) In the 20 months since Fifa banned the Uruguayan for sinking his teeth into Chiellini, the world governing body has been exposed as a hive of scum and villainy while Suárez has confirmed that he is the best striker on the planet.
  • (7) Fan reaction was overwhelmingly positive — Reddit, notoriously a wretched hive of scum and villainy (and sarcasm), had plenty of in-jokey commentary.
  • (8) When the regime tries to counter a peaceful demonstration by using thugs … there are few words that do justice to this villainy and I think it can only hasten that regime's departure."
  • (9) Chamcha, the inauthentic, uptight and elitist migrant to London, constantly mocked for these qualities while in Bombay, is allowed to redeem himself, while the indigenously rooted and social-climbing villain cannot escape the deserts of his villainy.
  • (10) Having marked out a special line in sadistic villainy as Ronald Merrick in his career-defining, Bafta award-winning performance in The Jewel in the Crown (1984) , Granada TV’s adaptation for ITV of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet novels, he built a portfolio of characters both good and bad who were invariably presented with layers of technical accomplishment and emotional complexity.
  • (11) Two centuries later, Ruskin echoed these sentiments: Caravaggio, he claimed, painted “for the sake of the shadows”, and he was a “ruffian … distinguished only by his preference for candlelight and reinforcement of villainy”.
  • (12) It was another example of his hard-faced villainy and he will have delighted at seeing Arsenal fall into the trap and never climb back out.
  • (13) His Richard III, suggested one critic, looked like the "unhappy result of a one-night stand between Père Ubu and Gertrude Stein", who never got over his own villainy.

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