What's the difference between ghastly and ghoulish?

Ghastly


Definition:

  • (superl.) Like a ghost in appearance; deathlike; pale; pallid; dismal.
  • (superl.) Horrible; shocking; dreadful; hideous.
  • (adv.) In a ghastly manner; hideously.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Coming shortly after the regime's successful third nuclear weapons test, Rodman's public declaration that he was Kim's "friend for life ", and the young premier's ability to parade his western visitors on state media, angered critics who argued that the country's ghastly poverty and brutal human rights violations were inadequately reflected.
  • (2) Since the banking crash of 2008 – "a ghastly political situation as well as a financial problem because it was so much to do with greed" – over a third of the practice's new work is in the far east.
  • (3) My recollections of the one execution I attended amount to memories of a ghastly, surrealistic encounter with justice.
  • (4) What’s happened is ghastly but we’ve got to ask ourselves some big questions,” he said.
  • (5) During a prolific career stretching back almost half a century, the Swedish author Henning Mankell, best known for his Wallander series, has produced several million words, many of them dealing with ghastly crimes.
  • (6) When I am asked who I consider a role model (another ghastly word), Shirley usually comes to mind.
  • (7) The lexicon of conflict in a place such as Kashmir engenders normalisation of even the most ghastly thing.
  • (8) But the most ghastly sketch and one I still find terribly funny was The Liver Donor .
  • (9) Hare accused the trend spotters of the early 21st century of lining up eagerly to pretend the controversy which raged around Look Back In Anger was "some kind of ghastly mistake".
  • (10) Not only have the people spoken and won, but the old administration, Obama and all those ghastly people, are out and the Trump people are in,” he said.
  • (11) One of the more brilliant concerns a weekend at the home of a ghastly senior professor.
  • (12) "Interviewing the rapists was ghastly," she says, "but the worst moment was when they left.
  • (13) Economies may fail, banking systems may collapse, but we'll always have Davos , late capitalism's annual attempt to recreate the experience of what it would be like to spend eternity in hell's most ghastly private members' club.
  • (14) The cost of inaction or further delaying our response is too ghastly to contemplate,” said David Phiri, subregional coordinator for Southern Africa at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
  • (15) At least the champions did not totally crumple but ultimately it was a futile exercise, delaying their first spell of prolonged pressure until Sergio Agüero had scored twice, Yaya Touré had pinched another and Nasri had rounded off a ghastly five-minute spell for United at the start of the second half when David de Gea was beaten twice in quick succession.
  • (16) The World Trade Organisation has had a truly ghastly week, the sort that would make governments or cabinet ministers resign.
  • (17) But back in the General Staff's Versailles-like HQ, among the columns, frescos and sweeping staircases, the Fragonards and the Bouchers on the walls and the marble floors underfoot, the aristocrats and the officer class – their faces mean, smug, scarred or fat – trade ghastly obscenities about acceptable death tolls and national honour, their moral universe and patterns of thought throttled by protocol, precedent, military codes and banal social etiquette.
  • (18) The main problem is that Hague recommended including 15 Polish MEPs from the Law and Justice party, which has absorbed the even more extreme nationalist League of Polish Families (described on the BBC's Today Programme by Poland's chief rabbi as "beyond the pale" because of their anti-Semitism) and the ghastly League of Self-Defence.
  • (19) In May 2002, when dissident soldiers mutinied against their commanders in the central city of Kisangani, Monuc troops did almost nothing as those commanders (including Laurent Nkunda) oversaw the killing of at least 80 civilians and a ghastly bout of rape.
  • (20) Stafford Smith said: "Shaker was absolutely thrilled with the letter from Hague, it shows how a certain amount of personal commitment by someone in power can help someone who has been downtrodden in such a ghastly way.

Ghoulish


Definition:

  • (a.) Characteristic of a ghoul; vampirelike; hyenalike.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) He lost no time climbing on the back of the clown car of the demagogue who, with ghoulishly oedipal glee, he calls “Daddy”.
  • (2) 5.02pm BST PS: one last line from Dublin, from Henry McDonald: There was some pre-Hallowe'en ghoulish reaction to one aspect of the budget cuts from Fianna Fail, the main opposition party in Ireland .
  • (3) That skull was buried in 1960 in the courtyard of Cromwell's old college, Sidney Sussex at Cambridge, in an unmarked spot to dissuade ghoulish souvenir hunters.
  • (4) On a couple of the paintings she has added little bright splashes of MRI brain scans, the slices of frontal lobe and cerebellum abstracting into ghoulish faces.
  • (5) Halloween’s ghoulish festivities have turned into a dangerous culture that brands mentally ill people as “psychos or schizos or freaks”, a government minister warns.
  • (6) Underneath its ghoulish milieu, Penny Dreadful throbs with a big, bruised heart and a baroque web of emotional nuance.
  • (7) But the true prize in this slightly ghoulish quest is not quite as easy to find.
  • (8) The soldiers also took ghoulish pictures of themselves with dead combatants.
  • (9) The article sparked an angry reaction on Twitter with South Africans accusing the media of ghoulish behaviour.
  • (10) His painting Anxiety depicts exactly the same view of the Oslofjord, but this time an entire crowd of ghoulish creatures walk bleakly towards us: their faces have the same dehumanised, spectral futility as those of the people he painted on Karl Johann street.
  • (11) He devoted assiduous attention to immigration, approvingly quoting the ghoulish ex-minister Phil Woolas , and there was an interesting peroration about tuition fees.
  • (12) That he was the ghoulish architect of the Iraq tragedy is only the most obvious error in karmic accounting.
  • (13) Worse still, when things get sticky, they reach for the ghoulish stereotypes that spread fear through Daily Mail-land: benefit scroungers, feral youths, problem families.
  • (14) Before even sighting the familiar city’s skyline, which had become in my mind ghoulish, I recognized an eatery my husband and I visited one evening years ago right across the street.
  • (15) At the time, Rostow developed an almost ghoulish enthusiasm for flip-charts detailing the "body count" on which his policies relied, an attitude wildly at variance with his gentler virtues.
  • (16) It’s stereotyping.” Josh Ghoulish (@thejoshl) Here I thought Ben Affleck couldn't be any cooler and then he slams Bill Maher's gross generalizations of Islam while promoting GONE GIRL.
  • (17) It is regrettable that just a week after Brazil's huge wave of social protest, our focus is on these ghoulish but random acts of rural violence, rather than the more significant political earthquake that has occurred.
  • (18) I'm sure we all agree there's nothing "ghoulish" whatsoever about eagerly imagining the hypothetical death of someone you've marked out as a potential cadaver on account of your ill-informed presumptions about their lifestyle.
  • (19) I am not going to pretend that I looked at the online Muamba images with the pure dispassion of a cultural commentator: there is a prurient, ghoulish human instinct to know what the worst moments of life might look like.
  • (20) These houses could be prize exhibits in a ghoulish museum of old Whitehall policy failures.

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