What's the difference between famous and infamous?

Famous


Definition:

  • (a.) Celebrated in fame or public report; renowned; mach talked of; distinguished in story; -- used in either a good or a bad sense, chiefly the former; often followed by for; as, famous for erudition, for eloquence, for military skill; a famous pirate.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In platform shoes to emulate Johnson's height, and with the aid of prosthetic earlobes, Cranston becomes the 36th president: he bullies and cajoles, flatters and snarls and barks, tells dirty jokes or glows with idealism as required, and delivers the famous "Johnson treatment" to everyone from Martin Luther King to the racist Alabama governor George Wallace.
  • (2) I can see you use humour as a defence mechanism, so in return I could just tell you that if he's massively rich or famous and you've decided you'll put up with it to please him, you'll eventually discover it's not worth it.
  • (3) Cameron famously broke with the past, and highlighted his green credentials, by posing with huskies on a visit to Svalbard in the Norwegian Arctic in 2006.
  • (4) They include two leading Republican hopefuls for the presidential race in 2016, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio; three of them enjoy A+ rankings from the NRA and a further eight are listed A. Rand Paul of Kentucky The junior senator's penchant for filibusters became famous during his nearly 13-hour speech against the use unmanned drones, and he is one of three senators who sent an initial missive to Reid , warning him of another verbose round.
  • (5) And Pippi Longstocking, her most famous character, comes really close to being the personified proof of that… So where did Pippi come from?
  • (6) It just seems a bit of a waste, I say, given that he's young and handsome and famous.
  • (7) BigDog Facebook Twitter Pinterest BigDog is a autonomous packhorse Funded by Darpa and the US army, BigDog is Boston Dynamics’ most famous robot, a large mule-like quadruped that walks around like a dog, self balancing and navigating a range of terrain.
  • (8) You’d be staggered by the number of dimwitted debutantes who stand for photos next to cakes iced with the famous double-C. You know how you wanted a Spider-Man cake when you were little, and your mum made you Spider-Man cake, and it was the happiest birthday of your life?
  • (9) Washington takes the role made famous by Edward Woodward in the 1980s US TV series that inspired the modern remake.
  • (10) As Justices Stewart and White famously said, "the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the areas of national defence and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry – in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government".
  • (11) Items deemed inappropriate now extended to Soviet writings on sexuality from the previous decade, when abortion was legalised and Alexandra Kollontai, the most famous woman in the Bolshevik government, called for the destruction of the traditional family — a movement reversed under Stalin.
  • (12) He was in Cruise of the Gods with Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon and David Walliams and, most famously, in the stage and screen version of The History Boys.
  • (13) In a country crisscrossed from sea to shining sea by some of the world’s longest and most famous roads, what could be more simple?
  • (14) In September 2007, Iran's former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously denied homosexuals existed in the Islamic republic.
  • (15) Born in a fashionable part of Manhattan on 1 January 1919, Salinger had a schooling that echoed his most famous creation, Holden Caulfield, with the writer asked to leave a New York prep school because of poor grades.
  • (16) At this time, the BPI was running its famous Home Taping Is Killing Music campaign, following concerns that cassettes would aid the infringement of copyright and a decline in album sales.
  • (17) Others will point out that this is a case of pot calling kettle black as Wolff is himself a famous peddler of tittle-tattle – the aggregator website that he cofounded, Newser, even has a section called "Gossip".
  • (18) That “social enterprise” is just a figleaf, which canny, profit-driven companies can manipulate (Emma Harrison, founder of A4e, famously used to call it a “social purpose company” before the Advertising Standards Authority, of all people, put a stop to it ).
  • (19) The Hard Rock Cafe has long been famous for its queue, but that was so odd it was a tourist attraction, something people pointed and laughed at.
  • (20) His mother is Denise Welch, late of Corrie and Loose Women, and his father his Tim Healy, who was briefly famous 30 years ago for his role in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

Infamous


Definition:

  • (a.) Of very bad report; having a reputation of the worst kind; held in abhorrence; guilty of something that exposes to infamy; base; notoriously vile; detestable; as, an infamous traitor; an infamous perjurer.
  • (a.) Causing or producing infamy; deserving detestation; scandalous to the last degree; as, an infamous act; infamous vices; infamous corruption.
  • (a.) Branded with infamy by conviction of a crime; as, at common law, an infamous person can not be a witness.
  • (a.) Having a bad name as being the place where an odious crime was committed, or as being associated with something detestable; hence, unlucky; perilous; dangerous.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It’s around this point in the film’s chronology that Rodman makes his now infamous appearance on CNN , where he rejected calls to assist in the release of American prisoner Kenneth Bae and shouted at interviewer Chris Cuomo.
  • (2) He will be asked to explain why he only once reputedly asked for assurances over Coulson, and why he infamously sent Brooks text messages ending in "LOL", which he believed meant lots of love.
  • (3) As well as George Dyer, there was the murderer Perry Smith in the Truman Capote story Infamous, the hot-headed mobster child-killer in Road To Perdition, the brooding Ted Hughes in Gwyneth Paltrow’s Sylvia biopic and a belligerent Mossad assassin in Steven Spielberg’s Munich.
  • (4) The 26-year-old – currently serving a domestic 10-game ban imposed by the Football Association for biting Chelsea's Branislav Ivanovic at the end of last season – could yet force the situation by handing in a formal transfer request , or even asking the Premier League to intervene over the interpretation of the now infamous get-out clause.
  • (5) The most infamous case of those whose bodies were recovered was that of Jean McConville.
  • (6) Now then, in his infamous rant at the press, Joe Kinnear told hacks to ask people like you what they thought of him.
  • (7) I had imagined that this would be an interesting journey, if not spectacularly scenic, since this landscape is infamously flat.
  • (8) Late-night on Philando Castile's death: 'When I watched the video, it broke me' Read more The host proceeded to discuss Donald Trump’s campaign-style rally in Iowa on Wednesday night, where “he was about to repeat his infamous claim that he’s done more in office than any president in history, although this time he caught himself, sort of”.
  • (9) Its infamous clubs – The Viper Room, Whisky A Go Go – are the backdrops for a thousand rock memoirs; its vertiginous hills contain more celebrity homes per square mile than anywhere else in the world.
  • (10) Yet Ferguson ignored him and the dispute over stud fees for Rock Of Gibraltar, the retired racehorse, started to have damaging ramifications at Old Trafford, with Magnier and McManus using their position as major shareholders to submit their infamous 99 Questions document, predominantly looking at 13 transfers from the Ferguson era.
  • (11) Mr Sharon is internationally infamous for being judged partly responsible for allowing the massacre of Palestinians by Christian Falangists at refugee camps in Beirut in 1982.
  • (12) Some of the Shia militias taking part in the campaign have also said they want to avenge the infamous Camp Speicher massacre, one of the largest incidents of mass execution by Isis, when up to 1,700 Iraqi Shia army cadets were massacred last year.
  • (13) It needs to be said that this is not about Imelda Marcos and her infamous collection of shoes , although her shopping habit is real.
  • (14) In the early noughties, over a period of four years and three big books, Niall Ferguson developed an argument for which he would become famous - or infamous, depending on your view.
  • (15) Gotti Jr's sister, Victoria Gotti, has been the star of the TV series Growing Up Gotti, which endeavoured to show the trials and tribulations of life bearing the infamous Gotti name.
  • (16) Picture Detroit today and the images that probably come to mind are of " ruin porn " (the now infamous term for beautifully shot photos of dilapidated buildings); urban exploring (the new craze of creeping around abandoned complexes as seen in Jim Jarmusch's new film Only Lovers Left Alive ) and foreclosure frenzy (there are now nearly 80,000 empty homes to be torn down or fixed up in Motor City).
  • (17) Life after El Chapo: a year on from drug kingpin’s capture, business is blooming Read more This is clearest, he says, in the lack of judicial action against collaborators of the world’s most infamous narco, the Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, arrested a year ago amid much fanfare.
  • (18) Iranian citizens were included in the US president’s infamous travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries.
  • (19) He said the presenter's infamous 6Music interview with Ray Davies, which the Kinks singer cut short after a series of increasingly obscure questions, was the "worst interview in the history of broadcasting".
  • (20) This performance was arguably more troubling than the infamous late capitulation in May.