What's the difference between gerund and infinitive?

Gerund


Definition:

  • (n.) A kind of verbal noun, having only the four oblique cases of the singular number, and governing cases like a participle.
  • (n.) A verbal noun ending in -e, preceded by to and usually denoting purpose or end; -- called also the dative infinitive; as, "Ic haebbe mete to etanne" (I have meat to eat.) In Modern English the name has been applied to verbal or participal nouns in -ing denoting a transitive action; e. g., by throwing a stone.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) A gerund is a verb ending in -ing that acts as a noun: I like swimming, smoking is bad for you, and so on.
  • (2) A research on the acquisition of morphemes of plural, diminutive, augmentative, gerund, imperfect, and preterite with 109 Spanish children from 3 to 6 is reported.
  • (3) Thirty years on from the riots, one walks up Prince's Avenue, past what was the incinerated Rialto and the sign into Toxteth, and yet another sign promising imminent arrival into the "Regeneration Zone", and showing pictures of a perfect cereal-packet multiracial family, pristine modern houses and beautifully refurbished original stock – beneath which is the inevitable crass slogan that accompanies every corporate or political effort these days, always beginning with a pretentious gerund, in this case: "Creating neighbourhoods for the future".
  • (4) Four hundred and twenty-seven deaf students (age 10 to 19 years) and 60 hearing children (age eight to 10 years) judged the grammaticality of sample sentences which contained infinitival or gerundive complements.
  • (5) 7 Don't fear the gerund Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle's guide to life at St Custard's school , How to Be Topp, features a cartoon in which a gerund attacks some peaceful pronouns, but it is nothing to be afraid of.

Infinitive


Definition:

  • (n.) Unlimited; not bounded or restricted; undefined.
  • (n.) An infinitive form of the verb; a verb in the infinitive mood; the infinitive mood.
  • (adv.) In the manner of an infinitive mood.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) 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.
  • (2) After 14 days of storage the reduction factors were infinite, 30 and 5, respectively.
  • (3) The culture pattern presented by the primary cultures did not appreciably change after passaging in vitro for periods of up to 2 years, even after infinite cell lines were established.
  • (4) At infinite dilution both steroids are well resolved, the trans isomer being eluted before the cis isomer.
  • (5) However, the maximal lysis of target cells at an infinite number of effectors was significantly less for normal compared with leukaemic targets.
  • (6) But the character – compounded of piercing sanity and existential despair, infinite hesitation and impulsive action, self-laceration and observant irony – is so multi-faceted, it is bound to coincide at some point with an actor’s particular gifts.
  • (7) In this (proliferative) model small doses of weakly antigenic tumors grow infinitely large (i.e.
  • (8) The aim was to create an infinite number of ways in which the story could be read – though Pears emphasised that Arcadia was not an interactive novel.
  • (9) We have found that the frequency of the allele which favours recombination increases in finite populations, and decreases slightly in infinite populations.
  • (10) I believe there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal saviour.
  • (11) Les Misérables is a game with destiny: it dramatises the gap between the imperfections of human judgments, and the perfect patterns of the infinite.
  • (12) The theoretical function described coherences between recording sites of small separation for linear, non-dispersive, dissipative waves moving on an infinite homogeneous plane medium, and driven by spatio-temporally noisy inputs.
  • (13) The changes in the integral of the extracellular action potentials (EAPs) generated by an infinite homogeneous fibre in an infinite homogeneous and isotropic volume conductor were studied at different radial distances (yo) from the fibre axis, depending on the propagation velocity (v), duration (Tin) and asymmetry of the intracellular action potential (IAP).
  • (14) The Macdonald-Dietz model for superinfection in malaria is a time-dependent infinite-server queue.
  • (15) The deterministic model (assuming infinite population size and random mating) predictions of the final gene frequency were exceeded only if there was reproductive compensation.
  • (16) Differential pencil beam (DPB) is defined as the dose distribution relative to the position of the first collision, per unit collision density, for a monoenergetic pencil beam of photons in an infinite homogeneous medium of unit density.
  • (17) Using fundamental concepts of hydrodynamics in porous media, we have rederived the Lumpkin-DèJardin-Zimm (LDZ) model for the gel electrophoresis of reptating, infinitely long, worm-like chains, such as DNA.
  • (18) Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation expresses it thus: "From the Pythagoreans onward, through the Renaissance to our times, the oceanic feeling, the sense of participation in the mystery of the infinite, was the principal inspiration of the wingèd and flat-footed creature, the scientist."
  • (19) Pressure-volume curves from nine ferrets (including the above six) revealed almost infinitely compliant chest walls so that lung and total respiratory system curves were essentially the same.
  • (20) An orderly process of dealing with asylum claims at the earliest point would be infinitely preferable to desperate families laying siege to central European railway stations, risking their lives clinging on to vehicles at Calais or suffocating in vehicles transporting them across borders.