What's the difference between harass and torment?

Harass


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To fatigue; to tire with repeated and exhausting efforts; esp., to weary by importunity, teasing, or fretting; to cause to endure excessive burdens or anxieties; -- sometimes followed by out.
  • (n.) Devastation; waste.
  • (n.) Worry; harassment.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The city council’s community safety team, now responsible for a leaflet campaign urging young Muslims not to join Isis, used to employ 31-year old Mashudur Choudhury as a racial harassment worker.
  • (2) Some 300 million women and girls are forced to defecate outside, exposed not only to the risks of disease and bacterial infection, but also harassment and assault by men.
  • (3) The checkpoints are a recipe for harassment and abuse.” Among other moves disclosed were plans to hire 300 extra security guards to secure public transport in the city.
  • (4) Kelly reportedly spoke with lawyers investigating claims of sexual harassment by former Fox chairman Roger Ailes, who left the network following allegations by several women of years of abuse.
  • (5) Even when things are taken more seriously, harassers are generally allowed to leave quietly, which enables them to move some place else and do the same thing.” Many of the women who made complaints to their institutions said they felt they were the ones on trial, while alleged perpetrators were often protected by management who feared losing a star researcher and their funding.
  • (6) A mother and her son shared delusional beliefs that doubles of themselves existed and that they were being harassed by the police and social and educational services.
  • (7) For me, this is what needs to change - we need a cultural shift in our attitudes and behaviours and that needs to see all of us standing up and calling out harassment and misogyny, whether it is in the street or the workplace, to erode that normalisation that makes perpetrators feel safe doing it again and again.
  • (8) He stressed that the sister-in-law and her husband were not only accused of circulating libellously untrue stories but also of harassment of the wealthy financier.
  • (9) Anna Gautheron only learned what the term "street harassment" meant when she read about it online.
  • (10) Rob Bliss, who runs a viral video marketing agency, created and directed the video in association with Hollaback , a New York-based group dedicated to ending street harassment .
  • (11) • Detainees’ families have suffered further persecution: for example, the wives of Li Heping, Wang Quanzhang, Xie Yang and Xie Yanyi have been subjected to police monitoring and harassment; the children of Li Heping and Wang Quanzhang have been denied enrolment at state schools due to police pressure; and the authorities have put pressure on the landlords of Wang Quanzhang’s and Xie Yanyi’s families to evict them from their homes.
  • (12) Almost all of the 20-plus women claim they experienced Ailes’s harassment firsthand.
  • (13) On one level this is quite just, as everyone has the right to defend themselves, but in cases of sexual harassment it does nothing to protect vulnerable people or to encourage them to come forward.
  • (14) Not only did erections survive unscathed, but sexual harassment continued to flourish.
  • (15) Public debate over the problem intensified after the 2011 uprising, with activists and lawyers saying they see progress in transforming attitudes and more harassers being jailed.
  • (16) And in the last month, it has faced serious allegations about sexual harassment , as early-stage investors have lambasted its “destructive culture” .
  • (17) Miller is suing the NoW's parent company, News Group, and Mulcaire, accusing them of breaching her privacy and of harassing her "solely for the commercial purpose of profiting from obtaining private information about her and to satisfy the prurient curiosity of members of the public regarding the private life of a well-known individual".
  • (18) The buses are so crowded that women are bound to get harassed.
  • (19) The tribunal added that Dean's dismissal was a consequence of unlawful harassment arising "not from treating the claimant differently from non-disabled associates [in enforcing the 'look policy'], but in treating her the same in circumstances where it should have made an adjustment".
  • (20) "Dreaming only of sleep and a sip of tea, the exhausted, harassed and dirty convict becomes obedient putty in the hands of the administration, which sees us solely as a free work force.

Torment


Definition:

  • (n.) An engine for casting stones.
  • (n.) Extreme pain; anguish; torture; the utmost degree of misery, either of body or mind.
  • (n.) That which gives pain, vexation, or misery.
  • (v. t.) To put to extreme pain or anguish; to inflict excruciating misery upon, either of body or mind; to torture.
  • (v. t.) To pain; to distress; to afflict.
  • (v. t.) To tease; to vex; to harass; as, to be tormented with importunities, or with petty annoyances.
  • (v. t.) To put into great agitation.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Her story is an incredible tale of triumph over tragedy: a tormented childhood during China's Cultural Revolution, detention and forced exile after exposing female infanticide – then glittering success as the head of a major US technology firm.
  • (2) "It is difficult to imagine the torment experienced by the vulnerable victims of crimes such as these.
  • (3) While his citizens were being beaten and tormented in illegal detention, spokesmen for the then prime minister, Tony Blair, declared: "The Italian police had a difficult job to do.
  • (4) Yet the removal of two in-form goalscorers who were tormenting West Ham – first Aaron Lennon and then Lukaku – afforded the visitors the initiative.
  • (5) Through small and large acts of deprivation and destruction we follow the process: the removal of hope, of dignity, of luxury, of necessity, of self; the reduction of a man to a hoarder of grey slabs of bread and the scrapings of a soup bowl (wonderfully told all this, with a novelist's gift for detail and sometimes very nearly comic surprise), to the confinement of a narrow bed – in which there is "not even any room to be afraid" – with a stranger who doesn't speak your language, to the cruel illogicality of hating a fellow victim of oppression more than you hate the oppressor himself – one torment following another, and even the bleak comfort of thinking you might have touched rock bottom denied you as, when the most immediate cause of a particular stress comes to an end, "you are grievously amazed to see that another one lies behind; and in reality a whole series of others".
  • (6) Corner to USA though... 1.33am BST 20 mins More tempo in the American play now, but Belgium intercept again, and Mirallas torments them down the Belgian right flank before hitting a low cross in that's hoofed safely clear.
  • (7) It cannot be right that anyone who has found the courage to escape their abusive or violent partner should be subjected to the stress and torment of being confronted and interrogated by them in any court.” Research by charity Women’s Aid suggests a quarter of women in family court proceedings have been cross-examined by an abusive former partner.
  • (8) Shin Dong-hyuk said he was tormented to see his father alive and speaking in the video released by Pyongyang in October.
  • (9) In a torment of frustration, Mohammed stood outside the governor's and threw a can of petrol over himself.
  • (10) More than a quarter of hospital beds are occupied by people with dementia (no surprise to anyone who has been in hospital recently, where wards are full of men and women in great anxiety and torment) and they tend to stay for longer-than-average periods of time.
  • (11) Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island whose bipartisan bill will ensure a three-month extension of the federal benefits program, told the Guardian the measure would stimulate the economy and alleviate what he called the “mental torment” suffered by those long-term unemployed who now feel abandoned.
  • (12) It was only his inflexible determination, the quality that had made him a great general, that mastered the torments of ill-health – sleepless nights, fear of dying – to articulate his account for a devoted American audience.
  • (13) The man who devised these torments has a passing resemblance to El Greco's emaciated saints.
  • (14) Arsenal had no riposte to the blue and white striped waves that tormented them all evening.
  • (15) Father Michael, so brilliantly played by Sean Bean , was tormented by one such moment: his decision not to answer the phone to Helen Oyenusi (Muna Otaru) when she called to ask that he calm down her son.
  • (16) Suárez played as through affronted by the suggestion he might have fitness issues, tormenting England’s defence on a night that finished as a personal ordeal for Steven Gerrard.
  • (17) So often did John torment his elder brother – because, grouchy alcoholic prick that he was, he hated to acknowledge a debt – one has to wonder if he cast Francis in a minor part in Young Mr Lincoln simply to let him witness, day after day, his own signature role being forever obliterated by Henry Fonda's entrancing new reading.
  • (18) Shawcross, however, maintains there was no bad intent and said for that reason he has not been tormenting himself about the moment he collided with Ramsey's right leg and left the teenager writhing in agony.
  • (19) Since his withdrawal from the music scene, Shields has earned a reputation as the latter-day Brian Wilson, a tormented genius unable to produce a successor to Loveless, the Pet Sounds of UK avant-rock.
  • (20) Adding to the torment for Rodgers was a 120-minute performance before hosting Manchester City in the Premier League on Sunday at noon.