What's the difference between hard and stony?

Hard


Definition:

  • (superl.) Not easily penetrated, cut, or separated into parts; not yielding to pressure; firm; solid; compact; -- applied to material bodies, and opposed to soft; as, hard wood; hard flesh; a hard apple.
  • (superl.) Difficult, mentally or judicially; not easily apprehended, decided, or resolved; as a hard problem.
  • (superl.) Difficult to accomplish; full of obstacles; laborious; fatiguing; arduous; as, a hard task; a disease hard to cure.
  • (superl.) Difficult to resist or control; powerful.
  • (superl.) Difficult to bear or endure; not easy to put up with or consent to; hence, severe; rigorous; oppressive; distressing; unjust; grasping; as, a hard lot; hard times; hard fare; a hard winter; hard conditions or terms.
  • (superl.) Difficult to please or influence; stern; unyielding; obdurate; unsympathetic; unfeeling; cruel; as, a hard master; a hard heart; hard words; a hard character.
  • (superl.) Not easy or agreeable to the taste; stiff; rigid; ungraceful; repelling; as, a hard style.
  • (superl.) Rough; acid; sour, as liquors; as, hard cider.
  • (superl.) Abrupt or explosive in utterance; not aspirated, sibilated, or pronounced with a gradual change of the organs from one position to another; -- said of certain consonants, as c in came, and g in go, as distinguished from the same letters in center, general, etc.
  • (superl.) Wanting softness or smoothness of utterance; harsh; as, a hard tone.
  • (superl.) Rigid in the drawing or distribution of the figures; formal; lacking grace of composition.
  • (superl.) Having disagreeable and abrupt contrasts in the coloring or light and shade.
  • (adv.) With pressure; with urgency; hence, diligently; earnestly.
  • (adv.) With difficulty; as, the vehicle moves hard.
  • (adv.) Uneasily; vexatiously; slowly.
  • (adv.) So as to raise difficulties.
  • (adv.) With tension or strain of the powers; violently; with force; tempestuously; vehemently; vigorously; energetically; as, to press, to blow, to rain hard; hence, rapidly; as, to run hard.
  • (adv.) Close or near.
  • (v. t.) To harden; to make hard.
  • (n.) A ford or passage across a river or swamp.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Lucy and Ed will combine coverage of hard and breaking news with a commitment to investigative journalism, which their track record so clearly demonstrates”.
  • (2) Sierra Leone is one of the three West Africa nations hit hard by an Ebola epidemic this year.
  • (3) Topical and systemic antibiotic therapy is common in dermatology, yet it is hard to find a rationale for a particular route in some diseases.
  • (4) Given Australia’s number one position as the worst carbon emitter per capita among major western nations it seems hardly surprising that islanders from Fiji, Samoa, Vanuatu and other small island developing states have been turning to Australia with growing exasperation demanding the country demonstrate an appropriate response and responsibility.
  • (5) They had learned through hard experience what Frederick Douglass once taught -- that freedom is not given, it must be won, through struggle and discipline, persistence and faith.
  • (6) In 60 rhesus monkeys with experimental renovascular malignant arterial hypertension (25 one-kidney and 35 two-kidney model animals), we studied the so-called 'hard exudates' or white retinal deposits in detail (by ophthalmoscopy, and stereoscopic color fundus photography and fluorescein fundus angiography, on long-term follow-up).
  • (7) It is a moment to be grateful for what remains of Labour's hard left: an amendment to scrap the cap was at least tabled by John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn but stood no chance.
  • (8) She stopped working only when the pain made it hard for her to get to work.
  • (9) He was reclusive, I know that, and he was often given a hard time for it.
  • (10) This defeat, though, is hardly a good calling card for the main job.
  • (11) Since this test is easily performed and hardly stresses the patient, it should routinely be the initial one for the diagnosis of renal osteopathy.
  • (12) Never become so enamored of your own smarts that you stop signing up for life’s hard classes.
  • (13) But I don't wish to be too hard on the judge for not taking that view.
  • (14) Our campaign has been going for some time and each step in our progress has been hard won, by campaigners paid and volunteer alike.
  • (15) I am rooting hard for you.” Ronald Reagan simply told his former vice-president Bush: “Don’t let the turkeys get you down.” By 10.30am Michelle Obama and Melania Trump will join the outgoing and incoming presidents in a presidential limousine to drive to the Capitol.
  • (16) All the same, it's hard to approach the school, which charges nearly £28,000 for boarders and nearly £19,000 for day girls and is sometimes called "the girls' Eton", without a few prejudices.
  • (17) Governmental officials as well as medical scientists in Taiwan have worked hard in recent years to develop and to implement various measures, such as prenatal diagnosis and neonatal screening, to lower the incidence of hereditary diseases and mental retardation in the population.
  • (18) Cooper, who was briefly a social worker in Los Angeles, also suggests working hard to build a rapport with colleagues in hotdesking situations.
  • (19) Critics of wind power peddle the same old myths about investment in new energy sources adding to families' fuel bills , preferring to pick a fight with people concerned about the environment, than stand up to vested interests in the energy industry, for the hard-pressed families and pensioners being ripped off by the energy giants.
  • (20) The spirit is great here, the players work very hard, we kept the belief when we were in third place and now we are here.

Stony


Definition:

  • (superl.) Of or pertaining to stone, consisting of, or abounding in, stone or stones; resembling stone; hard; as, a stony tower; a stony cave; stony ground; a stony crust.
  • (superl.) Converting into stone; petrifying; petrific.
  • (superl.) Inflexible; cruel; unrelenting; pitiless; obdurate; perverse; cold; morally hard; appearing as if petrified; as, a stony heart; a stony gaze.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Sitting on his stony porch, Rao asserts that he is not being romantic about the benefits of agriculture: “Here we earn more than 120,000 rupees [£1,170] a year, and our cost of living is one-fifth that of a city’s.
  • (2) Digital examination revealed that the prostate became stony-hard and larger 10 weeks after the initial BCG immunotherapy.
  • (3) Freed of the need to wave their tentacles around to hunt for food, the coral can devote more energy to secreting the mineral calcium carbonate, from which they form a stony exoskeleton.
  • (4) Not because the arts and humanities are especially hard to legitimise, but because everything is hard to justify when your opponent is standing there with crossed arms and a stony face.
  • (5) If someone’s able to keep such a stony-faced expression, it’s either high theatrics or they have no sympathy,” she added.
  • (6) It would face the same challenges and would continue to act in much the same way, steering the country towards new elections in late 2017 or 2018 and pursuing the stony path of incremental economic reform.
  • (7) We evaluated five enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays from Stony Brook (NY) University Hospital, Cambridge Bioscience (Worcester, Mass), Hillcrest Biologicals (Cypress, Calif), Sigma Diagnostics (St Louis, Mo), and Zeus-Wampole Scientific Inc (Raritan, NJ) and two fluorescent antibody tests (3M [Diagnostic Systems Inc, Santa Clara, Calif] and FIAX [Whittaker M.A.
  • (8) Without naming and shaming, during the USA's game against Portugal, I saw one leftwing tweeter ask with plaintive, stony-faced sincerity "how can anyone be supporting the imperialists?"
  • (9) No one is considered universally funny: there will always be someone stony-faced and dry-eyed in a room filled with hilarity, wondering what everyone else is laughing at.
  • (10) To a stony-faced audience at a conference organised by Learning Without Frontiers, she said: "We should recognise and embrace some of the good things that came out of the 19th century."
  • (11) The villages, whose populations range from a few hundred to 2,000, are scattered on stony land criss-crossed by busy roads, electricity pylons and cables and water pipes.
  • (12) Watched stony-faced by the Israeli delegation led by ambassador Ron Prosor, Abbas on Wednesday called for the international community to recognise Palestine as a state under occupation in the same way that countries were occupied in the second world war.
  • (13) If one of the first signs of ageing is being irritated by the young, I'd transformed into the ultimate short-fused, stony-eyed Methuselah.
  • (14) To help meet the need for physician manpower in preventive medicine a new residency was established at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in July 1983.
  • (15) The Stony Brook Child Psychiatric Checklist, a parent completed rating instrument based on DSM-III-R, was used as part of a psychiatric inpatient admission evaluation.
  • (16) At the School of Medicine of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the surgical clerkship became mandatory in 1976.
  • (17) Labour's riposte will be that the more difficult the economic news the stronger the yearning will be for a "change election" on the economy and the greater the premium on fairness in austerity – fertile terrain for Miliband, stony ground for the incumbent Cameron.
  • (18) The gland becomes stony hard, is not displaceable and, characteristically, the fibrous tissue penetrates the capsule and infiltrates into surrounding structures such as muscles, vessels, nerves and even the trachea.
  • (19) The liver was markedly enlarged and of stony consistency.
  • (20) The anti-Trident activists wave at the Faslane workers as they come and go; the workers remain stony-faced.