What's the difference between gavel and gravel?

Gavel


Definition:

  • (n.) A gable.
  • (n.) A small heap of grain, not tied up into a bundle.
  • (n.) The mallet of the presiding officer in a legislative body, public assembly, court, masonic body, etc.
  • (n.) A mason's setting maul.
  • (n.) Tribute; toll; custom. [Obs.] See Gabel.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Rather than reopen debate following the frantic final 24 hours of horse trading, the new chair gavelled through the decision in a fraction of a second.
  • (2) Marci Hamilton, author of God vs the Gavel and chair of public law at the Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law , has been fighting RFRA laws for nearly two decades.
  • (3) Regular protests from their delegation are prone to trigger selective deafness in other negotiators and conference chairs, who gavel through decisions anyway.
  • (4) Indeed just a couple hours after Vollmer was lowered into the ground the new Democratic House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, raised her gavel for the first time.
  • (5) When in 2008 he lost his coveted chairmanship of the energy and commerce committee, a gavel first held in 1981, it was partly because fellow Democrats believed he was too close to the auto industry .
  • (6) For some, gavel-to-gavel TV and radio coverage is providing an unprecedented education about the workings of the courts, albeit a version that few poor people would recognise.
  • (7) "There are lots of times when stock prices jump thousands of percentage points and nobody's banging a gavel saying it shouldn't be allowed."
  • (8) McCarthy backed out, said he was not going to run at this time, then Speaker Boehner got up, said the election was postponed, then the chairwoman banged the gavel and the meeting was over,” Costello said.
  • (9) His hold on the Speaker's gavel is tenuous; there could be a challenge next January when the new Congress is sworn in, and he wants to protect his flank from far right attacks.
  • (10) There were whoops and whistles in the New York saleroom of Christie’s on Monday evening after Jussi Pylkkänen put down his gavel at $160m.
  • (11) The talks were on the verge of collapse with the Danish prime minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, bringing his gavel down to abandon the meeting.
  • (12) I see no objections,” said the expressionless French foreign minister Laurent Fabius, barely glancing at the rows of country delegates then sharply banging his gavel.
  • (13) When Laurent Fabius brought down his green gavel in Paris on Saturday, the atmosphere in the hall was said to be electric .
  • (14) Seated on his plinth he seemed a languid, even slightly twinkly figure, spectacles balanced on the bridge of his nose, a velvet glove rather than a clattering gavel.
  • (15) As speaker of North Carolina’s House, Tillis used his gavel to oversee a dramatic shift rightwards in the state legislature, rendering the state legislature one of the most conservative laboratories for radical policies outside of Kansas.
  • (16) The "gavel-to-gavel" radio and TV coverage of the trial became something of a cultural phenomenon, spawning spoof Twitter accounts and YouTube videos.
  • (17) During a House vote Thursday afternoon, Ryan could be seen talking with Gowdy – the popular chair of the select committee on Benghazi who was touted by some to become majority leader, back when McCarthy looked all but set to take the speaker’s gavel.
  • (18) Rogers gavels the first panel to a close and brings in panel 2.
  • (19) And when he brought his gavel down on a sale of $160m (the figure rises to $179.4m once you include all the fees) a new record had been set.
  • (20) The Copenhagen accord was gavelled through in the early hours of yesterday morning after a night of extraordinary drama and two weeks of subterfuge.

Gravel


Definition:

  • (n.) Small stones, or fragments of stone; very small pebbles, often intermixed with particles of sand.
  • (n.) A deposit of small calculous concretions in the kidneys and the urinary or gall bladder; also, the disease of which they are a symptom.
  • (v. t.) To cover with gravel; as, to gravel a walk.
  • (v. t.) To run (as a ship) upon the gravel or beach; to run aground; to cause to stick fast in gravel or sand.
  • (v. t.) To check or stop; to embarrass; to perplex.
  • (v. t.) To hurt or lame (a horse) by gravel lodged between the shoe and foot.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The dogs were housed in gravel-based, outdoor pens with doghouses in a high-altitude, high-sunshine level environment.
  • (2) Except for the blue guard towers it is drained of colour, a grey sameness coating gravel, fences and buildings.
  • (3) A former showgirl from the gravel pits of Wraysbury in Berkshire, Keeler was just 19 and was staying on the estate with her friend, patron and (some said) pimp, the society osteopath Stephen Ward.
  • (4) I found myself skirting the wood’s perimeter, a no-go zone of the past for us, and came next to a gravel-pocked face mined by rabbits with one of the burrows crowned with the skull of an ancestor.
  • (5) Opening up these magnificent forests for logging is like mining the great pyramids of Egypt for road gravel," said McKim.
  • (6) A potholed gravel road runs to a campsite at the mouth of the Mattole river and from there you can wander south down the coast for 25 miles before you come to the next road, at Shelter Cove.
  • (7) On the Sabbath the fleet of earthmovers that ordinarily grind the route to Lombrum – ferrying gravel to the detention centre building site where a crew of 300 labor to finish new staff accommodation – are resting in their compound.
  • (8) The reactivity of soils varies widely as geological and sedimentological conditions offer typical but different environments: gravels, chalk soil, clay, salt soils, sands, cave earths are examples of this wide variety, including atmospheric and biogenetic implications.
  • (9) The cellar level is on the average 5.4 times higher if the cellar has partially a gravel or earth floor than if the whole cellar surface is covered with a concrete floor.
  • (10) But it doesn't work that way: you may have "less gravel", but most writers agree that you can only have "fewer pebbles", not "less pebbles".
  • (11) This biomass was computed from that of the organisms and associated naphthalene oxidation activity washed from the gravel compared with the original suspension.
  • (12) We can talk about "many pebbles" but not "much pebbles", "much gravel" but not "many gravel".
  • (13) Ultrasound detected 59 of 60 foreign bodies, including all cubes of meat embedded with gravel, cactus spine, plastic, metal, and wood.
  • (14) Tulisa led, and did so with panache and some beautiful gravel.
  • (15) This means putting a layer of bark, grass cuttings, manure, even gravel on top of the soil to trap moisture in the earth, or at least slow down evaporation.
  • (16) Aged 102, Bi Kidude, the gravel-voiced singer known her raucous sense of humour and her love of cigarettes, suddenly vanished from her home.
  • (17) Trying to solve an actual problem of enhancing the spontaneous passage of fragments, "calculous trails" and gravel in the patients who underwent remote lithotripsy the authors used the technique of local vibrotherapy in 54 postoperative patients.
  • (18) We are on a gravel track and have been driving for a long time.
  • (19) One of its largest islands is gentle-paced Brønnøya, with its apple orchards, gravel roads and beaches.
  • (20) Photograph: Water Literacy Foundation In Masagi’s pit-based system, permanent structures of mud, sand, soil, gravel and boulders are built, eight per acre of farmland, and partially filled with a mix of gravel and sand.