What's the difference between faint and subtle?

Faint


Definition:

  • (superl.) Lacking strength; weak; languid; inclined to swoon; as, faint with fatigue, hunger, or thirst.
  • (superl.) Wanting in courage, spirit, or energy; timorous; cowardly; dejected; depressed; as, "Faint heart ne'er won fair lady."
  • (superl.) Lacking distinctness; hardly perceptible; striking the senses feebly; not bright, or loud, or sharp, or forcible; weak; as, a faint color, or sound.
  • (superl.) Performed, done, or acted, in a weak or feeble manner; not exhibiting vigor, strength, or energy; slight; as, faint efforts; faint resistance.
  • (n.) The act of fainting, or the state of one who has fainted; a swoon. [R.] See Fainting, n.
  • (v. i.) To become weak or wanting in vigor; to grow feeble; to lose strength and color, and the control of the bodily or mental functions; to swoon; -- sometimes with away. See Fainting, n.
  • (n.) To sink into dejection; to lose courage or spirit; to become depressed or despondent.
  • (n.) To decay; to disappear; to vanish.
  • (v. t.) To cause to faint or become dispirited; to depress; to weaken.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Sleep was defined behaviorally as failure to respond to the faint auditory RT cue.
  • (2) On the other hand, immunofluorescence in anterior pituitary cells was faint and detected in only 2 of 28 patients with Graves' disease (7.1%) after absorption of their sera with rat liver aceton powder.
  • (3) Implications of these findings for fear and fainting acquisition and its relation to avoidance were discussed.
  • (4) Atlético Madrid maintained their faint hopes of catching Barcelona by recording a fourth straight league win, comfortably beating Deportivo la Coruña 3-0 with goals by the midfielder Saúl Ñíguez, top scorer Antoine Griezmann and Argentinian forward Ángel Correa.
  • (5) One subject reported slight transient faintness and visual blurring after 20 mg of the drug.
  • (6) I watched some boxing last night," he replies in his faint, lisping voice.
  • (7) Supporting a Sunderland side who had last won a home Premier League game back in January, when Stoke City were narrowly defeated, is not a pursuit for the faint-hearted but this was turning into the equivalent of the sudden dawning of a gloriously hot sunny day amid a miserable, cold, wet summer.
  • (8) Positive specimens produce a faint pink deposit which is better visualised by silver enhancement which gives an intense black colour.
  • (9) The pI 5.0 component, designated F-5.0, was faint yellow, with a broad absorption in the range of 400-450 nm, while the pI 7.5 component, designated F-7.5, was colorless and did not absorb in that range.
  • (10) There is the sound of engines hissing and crackling, which have been mixed to seem as near to the ear as the camera was to the cars; there is a mostly unnoticeable rustle of leaves in the trees; periodically, so faintly that almost no one would register it consciously, there is the sound of a car rolling through an intersection a block or two over, off camera; a dog barks somewhere far away.
  • (11) Among the observed side effects were moderate pelvic cramps (20.9%), nausea (27%), fainting (4.8%); 61.3% of the women complained of fatigue.
  • (12) The study has revealed a faintly pronounced inverse correlation between the degree of avidity of serum antibodies and the level of infectious antigenemia.
  • (13) The intravenous injection of 5-HT relieves established migraine headache, but causes side-effects of nausea, faintness, paraesthesia and dyspnoea.
  • (14) Uptake in the other benign lesions such as trauma of the ribs, spondylosis deformans, and arthrosis deformans was rather faint.
  • (15) Consistent with these measures, derived from self-reported data, physician-diagnosed measures also indicate a greater vulnerability of unemployed individuals to serious physical ailments such as heart trouble, pain in heart and chest, high blood pressure, spells of faint-dizziness, bone-joint problems and hypertension.
  • (16) The tec gene is expressed mainly in liver and faintly in heart, kidney and ovary.
  • (17) All lymphomas and plasmacytomas were negative with MAK-6 and CAM-5.2, however, AE1:AE3 faintly stained two of three plasmacytomas and two of the seven large cell lymphomas.
  • (18) In the arterial blood, ESR signal of HbNO with faint hyperfine structure was detected.
  • (19) He is also characterised as "the devoted husband of a bestselling novelist with a few of her own ideas about how fiction works"; a funny sentence construction that carries a faint whiff of husband stoically bent over his books as wife keeps popping up with pesky theories about realism.
  • (20) Total RNP contained more small subunit proteins than 110S RNP; 7 proteins spots were distinct, 10 protein spots were faint and 8 protein spots were missing.

Subtle


Definition:

  • (superl.) Sly in design; artful; cunning; insinuating; subtile; -- applied to persons; as, a subtle foe.
  • (superl.) Cunningly devised; crafty; treacherous; as, a subtle stratagem.
  • (superl.) Characterized by refinement and niceness in drawing distinctions; nicely discriminating; -- said of persons; as, a subtle logician; refined; tenuous; sinuous; insinuating; hence, penetrative or pervasive; -- said of the mind; its faculties, or its operations; as, a subtle intellect; a subtle imagination; a subtle process of thought; also, difficult of apprehension; elusive.
  • (superl.) Smooth and deceptive.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) As a group, the three mammalian proteins resemble bovine serum conglutinin and behave as lectins with rather broad sugar specificities directed at certain non-reducing terminal N-acetylglucosamine, mannose, glucose and fucose residues, but with subtle differences in fine specificities.
  • (2) But it will be a subtle difference, because it's already abundantly clear there's no danger of the war being suddenly forgotten, or made to seem irrelevant to our sense of what Europe and the world has to avoid repeating.
  • (3) Communicating sustainability is a subtle attempt at doing good Read more And yet, in environmental terms it is infinitely preferable to prevent waste altogether, rather than recycle it.
  • (4) If, indeed, there is an immunologic basis for pre-eclampsia, it is more subtle than the methodology used in this study is capable of detecting.
  • (5) Subtle differences between Chicago urban and Grand Forks rural climates are reflected in arthritic subjects' degree of pain and their perception of pain-related stress.
  • (6) Critical in this understanding are the subtle changes that occur in the individual patient, reflecting the natural history of the disease or response to its treatment.
  • (7) Subtle cognitive deficits in Inferential Reading Comprehension were detected when Reading Vocabulary was at or better than a twelfth grade level.
  • (8) This histochemical difference corresponded to more subtle differences in Nissl and myelin staining patterns, and suggests further structural subdivisions of potential functional significance.
  • (9) Thus, luciferase transcriptional fusions can detect subtle variations in initial rates of gene expression in a real-time, nondestructive assay.
  • (10) The binding of [3H]PAF to washed human platelets indicated subtle changes between Days 2 and 4, which became more noticeable by Day 6.
  • (11) In this study the temperature dependence of the reactivity of aldolase SH groups is investigated in order to detect subtle changes in the enzyme conformation.
  • (12) The crucial issue of whether subtle behavioral, intellectual, and developmental impairment occurs in young children, as a result of lead-induced CNS damage is discussed in detail.
  • (13) Historically, what made SNL’s campaign coverage so necessary was its ability to highlight the subtle absurdities of the election and exaggerate the ridiculous.
  • (14) It is believed that by looking at such subtle shape differences an understanding of what it means morphologically for a primate to be either more or less arboreal may be achieved.
  • (15) The current magnetic resonance imaging system with computerized image processing is a sensitive and simple method for evaluation of subtle parenchymal changes of the brain.
  • (16) Fundus examination disclosed a subtle cherry red spot bilaterally.
  • (17) Ependymal cells developed luminal fronds that projected into the ventricle and the subpial glia displayed a very subtle gliosis in the form of thin multi-laminated processes.
  • (18) The rapidity of obtaining the results (within one hour), the complete absence of untoward reactions to the radiopharmaceuticals, the much lower frequency of subtle or indeterminate results, the ability to render useful information in the presence of moderate jaundice and the lack of interference from overlying intestinal contents establishes these radionuclide agents as superior to both radiographic oral and intravenous cholangiography in the investigation of the acute abdomen.
  • (19) Moreover, subtle improvements observed in earlier investigations were not confirmed.
  • (20) Various compounds show subtle but significant differences in blood clearance, excretion, and soft-tissue uptake.