What's the difference between ghastly and gruesome?

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.

Gruesome


Definition:

  • (a.) Ugly; frightful.
  • (a.) Same as Grewsome.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Brand names would instead be printed in small type and feature large health warnings and gruesome, full-colour images of the consequences of smoking.
  • (2) And it is getting worse every day.” He shows a gruesome image from his Facebook page on his phone showing a Kurdish fighter being beheaded by Isis jihadis.
  • (3) On 20 August, the day after IS released its gruesome video, for every 95 searches for “google” there were 11 for “james foley”, and two for “james foley video”.
  • (4) If the scoreline has a pleasing symmetry, the tennis was gruesome to watch – at least from the Luxembourg bench, where their coach, the human rights lawyer on his holidays, Jacques Radoux, looked as if he had just been asked to defend Rebekah Brooks.
  • (5) But recent events, especially the murder of Boris Nemtsov in Moscow, have led to renewed debate over whether the Kremlin’s political control over the region, won back after two gruesome wars in the post-Soviet years, may be loosening.
  • (6) This is in stark comparison to the gruesome, vicious suffering that he inflicted on his two victims – and the lifetime of suffering he has caused their family.” Wood was executed for shooting to death Debra Dietz, his former girlfriend, and her father, Eugene Dietz, in Tucson in 1989.
  • (7) There is now less of a chance of a back-to-back cut next month, unless there is some particularly gruesome economic data over the next couple of weeks.
  • (8) Some 558 rhino have been killed in South Africa already this year, setting the country on course for a gruesome new record number of poaching deaths, wildlife officials said on Thursday.
  • (9) Now, with the gruesome killing of Farooq, a senior if largely colourless figure, the bloodshed appears to have spread from Pakistan to the streets of north London.
  • (10) While the beheading of hostages from the US, Britain and Japan drew condemnation from most religious sects within Islam , the gruesome images of the airman’s murder served as a unifying battlecry for Muslims across the world.
  • (11) Nor do banks that have lent trillions that will never be repaid post gruesome videos.
  • (12) Day 9: 13 March 2014 Gruesome images of Steenkamp shortly after her death were inadvertently shown to the packed courtroom , causing Pistorius to vomit and horrifying her supporters in the public gallery.
  • (13) In the final gruesome hours of waiting, the American judicial system at its very highest echelons was involved – including the US supreme court, which issued the decisive final ruling.
  • (14) In that case the prisoner took 43 minutes to die in a gruesome spectacle denounced by Barack Obama as “deeply troubling”.
  • (15) Then, in a gesture that seemed to echo Oklahoma’s fierce commitment to secrecy in the way it carries out lethal injections, the curtains were drawn over the execution chamber, obscuring the gruesome spectacle from public view.
  • (16) Speaking a week after his youngest brother, Jaffar, 17 , was killed storming a Syrian government checkpoint, Deghayes said: “I cant afford to leave jihad and the journey to jannah [paradise].” Jaffar is the youngest known Briton to have died during the gruesome three-year conflict.
  • (17) That gruesome threshold was also crossed in August, so that these became the bloodiest months in the city's history, escalating the tally for 2009 to more than 1,800.
  • (18) While local emergency services performed gruesome cleanup feats in difficult conditions, there was little coordination or oversight of the work and on occasions bodies and possessions were seen being thrown into unmarked vehicles.
  • (19) During the 2010 election, David Cameron travelled the country issuing what he hoped were blood-freezing warnings that a hung parliament would be the most gruesome catastrophe to engulf Britain since the Black Death.
  • (20) Some 25,000 residents – 10% of his constituents – have been displaced, and nearly 2,000 killed, with gruesome reminders of the tragedy becoming ever more apparent every day: this week a second mass burial site was dug to accommodate the growing number of corpses found washed ashore or from the mounds of debris that line the city's streets and canals.