What's the difference between flunk and plunk?

Flunk


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To fail, as on a lesson; to back out, as from an undertaking, through fear.
  • (v. t.) To fail in; to shirk, as a task or duty.
  • (n.) A failure or backing out
  • (n.) a total failure in a recitation.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Even now, there is a sense that it could go either way, that we might pass this mammoth test or flunk it.
  • (2) The watchdog flunked the opportunity to extend the price cap to all those acknowledged to be stuck on over-priced standard variable tariffs and last summer dumped suggestions the big firms should be broken up.
  • (3) News that the eurozone had flunked its Greek test, again, sent the euro sliding (down half a cent to $1.275).
  • (4) In the nationwide panic over inheritance tax – David Cameron’s 2007 vote-winning pledge to raise the threshold to £1m is cited as the main reason why Gordon Brown flunked a decision to call an election – the only real winners have been the very well-off.
  • (5) Photograph: NIESR Updated at 4.27pm BST 4.23pm BST First it was Germany's banks ( 8.07am ) now it's America's car industry which is feeling the love from the ratings agencies... Bloomberg TV (@BloombergTV) BREAKING: Ford, Ford Motor credit raised to investment grade by S&P September 6, 2013 3.54pm BST Back in Europe, and the Open Europe thinktank has published an interesting theorette today - about how Germany's far left Die Linke party could hold the balance of power after the general elections on 22 September: This is how Merkel could flunk the elections: enter the Far Left It all relies on the fact that parties need to win 5% of the vote to win seats in the Bundestag, and Angela Merkel's coalition partners, the Free Democrats, are hovering close to the cliff-edge.
  • (6) If the prime minister flunks this energy-saving test, he will confirm the Sun's story, and look like the weak victim of the short-term pressures he once promised to fight.
  • (7) "The one test he had, he flunked," said a party apparatchik, referring to Johnson's defeat in the 2007 deputy leadership contest.
  • (8) He flunked the test and this was the turning point in the debate.
  • (9) Did I tell you I had just been thrown out for flunking four subjects?
  • (10) The banks that flunked out only need to raise an additional €2.5bn capital, although 16 others passed only by the skin of their teeth and will have to take measures to shore up their financial position.
  • (11) The manager, Gus Poyet, had suggested that his players were playing for their places in next Sunday's Capital One Cup final against Manchester City; this was an audition flunked.
  • (12) Mr Brown also accused Mr Cameron of flunking his "Clause 4 moment" over grammar schools, caving into his party instead of supporting his education spokesman.
  • (13) Well, mostly just the protagonist Chip Baskets (Galifianakis), a clown who flunks out of clown school in Paris – he enrolled without knowing French – and returns home to Bakersfield, California.
  • (14) He subsequently flunked out of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst after contracting gonorrhoea.
  • (15) Having come up with the idea and agreed to the targets, the banks then flunked the most important one, on lending to small businesses.
  • (16) In certain special situations in psychoanalytic treatment there is a need to mobilize ego strength: (1) those patients who are "so infantile" that they need ego strengthening to mature sufficiently to cope with their lives; (2) patients who regress partially during psychoanalysis and cannot progress without analytic intervention to help strengthen their ego; (3) those patients with a strong tendency toward regression whose egos need immediate strengthening in analysis to prevent an immobilizing regression; (4) those patients for whom a stressful reality situation so undermines their confidence that they fall into a severe regression and need to be helped out of this as an emergency to avoid permanent trouble, such as flunking out of school or getting fired from their jobs.
  • (17) Despite flunking his accountancy exams the first time round, Rake became Britain's best-paid accountant.
  • (18) The son of an affluent businessman, he flunked his way through school.
  • (19) In Brighton last week, Gordon Brown flunked it, preferring to stress spending pledges over coming austerity.

Plunk


Definition:

Example Sentences:

  • (1) 2.12am BST Pirates 3 - Reds 0, top of 4th Shin-Soo Choo is hit by a Liriano pitch, and that happens a lot - he led all of baseball in that esteemed category by being plunked 26 times.
  • (2) And plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened.
  • (3) Not boxing’s browbeaten but devoted fans, at least 300,000 of whom are sure to plunk down $75 for a fight no less one-sided than Death Star v Alderaan.
  • (4) It appeared, oddly, as though he was doing mostly nothing that afternoon, just clicking in slow, methodical plunks.
  • (5) A final word about Anna and Bates, who are plunked back into the same kind of silence and mutual misunderstanding that defined their early relationship and which seems to be driving them inevitably toward a wholly evitable bad end.
  • (6) Read more As a cigarette packet designer, John Digianni, explains in an interview on the tobacco industry website Tobacco Today : “A cigarette package is part of a smoker’s clothing, and when he saunters into a bar and plunks it down, he makes a statement about himself.
  • (7) Even worse, shortstop Hanley Ramirez, so important to the LA lineup, still has rib issues after being plunked by Joe Kelly in Game One and missing Game Two - he'll be in the lineup but can he be effective?

Words possibly related to "flunk"

Words possibly related to "plunk"