What's the difference between gleam and glisten?

Gleam


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To disgorge filth, as a hawk.
  • (n.) A shoot of light; a small stream of light; a beam; a ray; a glimpse.
  • (n.) Brightness; splendor.
  • (v. t.) To shoot, or dart, as rays of light; as, at the dawn, light gleams in the east.
  • (v. t.) To shine; to cast light; to glitter.
  • (v. t.) To shoot out (flashes of light, etc.).

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Archaeologists still argue about what it originally held, but visitors can now peer inside and see gleaming in the darkness a statue of Taharqa, loaned by Southampton museums.
  • (2) Every bit of her gleams with a sweet and shiny polish: which is probably a natural residue of her southern-belle charm, but is probably also partly attributable to the professional gloss the 20-year-old seems to have acquired with remarkable ease over her nascent two-year film career.
  • (3) Half a dozen bodyguards fan out from the trucks, and when they are in position, the Ace slowly climbs down from the driving seat of his gleaming landcruiser.
  • (4) Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways gleaming across our beautiful land,” Trump said in his speech before Congress last Tuesday as he renewed a campaign promise, vowing to ask Congress for a $1tn infrastructure investment package financed through public and private capital.
  • (5) In this she differs from both Jeremy Corbyn and the gleaming-eyed Brexiteers, who share a belief in a route-map to the promised land.
  • (6) Now Murray and his team-mates – whoever they may be in the final, although his brother, Jamie, is nailed on after reaching two major doubles finals this year – will stare more history in the face, a chance to lift the gleaming goblet for the first time since Fred Perry helped win it in 1936, the year he abandoned British tennis for a life among the professionals in America.
  • (7) Downing Street has refused to release the guest list for this year's bash at the private Hurlingham members' club in Fulham, west London, but the gleaming Rolls-Royces and Jaguars streaming through the gates gave a hint of the wealthy passengers heading inside.
  • (8) The eyes gleamed with fury, like the glimpse of flame you have on opening the air vent in a wood stove.
  • (9) Of course the polarisation of old and young rests on a fallacy, if not a downright lie: that all young people possess perfect skin and gleaming hair, have non-stop sex, are bursting with energy and are never lonely.
  • (10) Tsipras of Athens – a gripping drama entering its final act | Larry Elliott Read more Perhaps you have an image of Deutschland as being a nation of highly skilled, highly rewarded workers in gleaming factories.
  • (11) At one point, one knelt in front of the gleaming coffin topped with white roses.
  • (12) At the meeting Burragubba played the didgeridoo, a performance he repeated outside the bank’s gleaming glass and steel headquarters in the City.
  • (13) In the flesh, though, he's more Bruce Forsyth than Bruce Willis: sweet-eyed, gleaming-teethed, with a keen ear for innuendo and a frankly mucky chuckle.
  • (14) Speaking in Donetsk's Victoria hotel – a gleaming multistorey edifice next to the city's state-of-the-art Donbass football stadium – Taruta says he's confident presidential elections due on 25 May will take place.
  • (15) We put stuff in there that was not really that good, but fortunately there were a couple of gleaming things that everyone remembers while they've forgotten the dross."
  • (16) For mid-century Americans, these gleaming marketplaces provided an almost utopian alternative to the urban commercial district, an artificial downtown with less crime and fewer vermin.
  • (17) Photograph: Supplied by LMK Earlier this year, the Post – whose traffic numbers reached a record 83.1m unique visitors in September 2016, a 40% year-on-year increase – moved from its former base to a gleaming, light-filled building on K Street, where reporters sit cheek-by-jowl with software engineers.
  • (18) This sort of rabid protectionism might feel depressingly inevitable in the gleaming, super-efficient first world of tournaments such as Germany 2006.
  • (19) Behind 300 metres of gleaming chain-link fence, men in high-vis jackets paced and measured, while one man stood and watched.
  • (20) The oil boom has led to an influx of luxury brands and gleaming Rolls Royce showrooms and upmarket shopping malls studded with Gucci, Lacoste and Prada stores line the streets of downtown Baku.

Glisten


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To sparkle or shine; especially, to shine with a mild, subdued, and fitful luster; to emit a soft, scintillating light; to gleam; as, the glistening stars.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) McArdle – who plays Abrahams, the Jewish runner who sees proving himself on the track as a way of combatting antisemitism – is glistening with sweat.
  • (2) I found the new hope in my heart," he said, eyes glistening with tears.
  • (3) Somewhere, glistening in the ashes, there might remain a copy of Jane Eyre.
  • (4) I opened my eyes to see the pristine beach glistening in the clean dawn air.
  • (5) Bake for a further 10-15 minutes until well browned and glistening.
  • (6) I sat there, bundled up against the cold, on benches carved from ice, with glistening icy walls and snow flurries falling through ventilation holes, while a folk band played glowing instruments – carved out of ice.
  • (7) This he achieves by rearranging her intestines, picking through them and, somewhere among the glistening loops, cutting a section in two and rerouting the ends.
  • (8) Fuchsin glistening colonies as well as the total bacterial counts on Sabouraud agar and Leifson agar as well as on kanamycin-esculin agar showed frequency peaks which were one power of ten lower.
  • (9) Marks & Spencer is offering fruit juice laced with glitter and smoked salmon topped with gold leaf; Sainsbury will be selling edible glistening Christmas baubles made from chocolate; while Asda is offering a glitter-topped version of the traditional pudding.
  • (10) These buttery potato scones glisten on my plate like Grecian tiles.
  • (11) The examination of the fundus showed dense, glistening bright yellow crystalline deposits around the maculae.
  • (12) Necropsy findings included generalized edema of the visceral organs and diffuse red glistening foci on the capsular and cut surfaces of the cortex of both kidneys.
  • (13) The overwhelming impression is one of tasteful reserve, of glistening cream paint and shining green and black railings – until you pause to examine the enormous heft of the houses: vast, detached palaces, with too many windows to count, on a scale dwarfing other private homes in London .
  • (14) Both lesions were surgically excised and found to be cystic in nature and filled with glistening gelatinous material consistent with partially absorbed, encysted gelatin film (Gelfilm).
  • (15) After Tony and his shiny head did the dirty with Tracy Barlow, the goddess of pure evil, Liz went straight into a rebound fling with Dan, a man so slimy he glistens.
  • (16) In my place I'm fine, but if I use my glistening podium, to talk to the people I grew up with, or signed on with or used drugs with, vulnerable overlooked, underserved, ordinary people, people that can't sue them as I am, then out come the fangs.
  • (17) The typical chondrosarcoma is low in grade but malignant and it arises in the nasal cavity as a large, pale, glistening mass.
  • (18) As the plane came into land in Seattle over the glistening waters of the Puget Sound, after a long journey from Iraq, he only had one thought: “Now we’ll be safe.
  • (19) More than 180 miles west of Barclays Bank's glistening skyscraper in the heart of Canary Wharf, a small group of tax protesters will gather outside one of its lesser-known branches.
  • (20) The disease was characterized by juvenile degeneration of the vitreous with detachment of the vitreous body and some floating vitreous opacities, cystoid degeneration of the peripheral retina with whitish glistening stippled areas of superficial retinal degeneration, spotty hyperpigmentation, patches of retinal atrophy with pigmentations, occasional atrophic retinal holes, and in four family members at the age of 4 to 12 years, unilateral or bilateral retinal detachment with breaks in the peripheral retina.