What's the difference between humdrum and monotonous?

Humdrum


Definition:

  • (a.) Monotonous; dull; commonplace.
  • (n.) A dull fellow; a bore.
  • (n.) Monotonous and tedious routine.
  • (n.) A low cart with three wheels, drawn by one horse.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) As a recovering graduate of an institution that played host to a similar bunch of charmers, all I can say is, so far, so humdrum.
  • (2) Gardiner, of course, is not Dominic Jones or Samuel Rhodes; the reality is both more interesting and more humdrum.
  • (3) Her only digression from a rather set, humdrum routine came when in 1975 she divorced her husband and then two years later remarried him.
  • (4) The match took a while to warm up, with Mark Noble’s sweet strike against the underside of the bar the best of a humdrum first half.
  • (5) The rain came down but, with apologies to Morrissey, this was anything but a humdrum town.
  • (6) The learned judge, now back at the more humdrum business of the court of appeal, may be reflecting on the advice of whoever it was who first advised against picking a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.
  • (7) It was both surreal and humdrum at the same time, and that's when I realised just how odd a period we had lived through."
  • (8) Mom always thought such things were middle-class, but I longed for the humdrum of middle-class.
  • (9) Man of the Match - Cristiano Ronaldo His excitement and joy were happily contagious in a humdrum match.
  • (10) She’s free of humdrum routines like school and homework, and is completely self-sufficient.
  • (11) This humdrum victory for Manchester United has a considerable impact on the league table with Sir Alex Ferguson's team, inspired by Cristiano Ronaldo, now four points clear of Chelsea and bristling with a wicked sense of pleasure about the vulnerability of their main challengers.
  • (12) As he said in an interview in the Times on Saturday: "All Tories at whatever level, even a humdrum municipal politician like me, want a Conservative government back in 2015."
  • (13) Fall of the 'Fake Sheikh': how the tables turned on Mazher Mahmood Read more It must be especially galling that his downfall came about after one of his more humdrum sting operations, involving the singer and TV personality Tulisa Contostavlos.
  • (14) At the England squad announcement, which took place at the Luton headquarters of their sponsors Vauxhall, Roy Hodgson was asked if his team was more like a humdrum family saloon or a sports car.
  • (15) Explorers, cartographers and geographical pioneers from Mercator to Palin are presumably humdrum intellectual backmarkers and the study of authors such as Dickens or Eliot, Günter Grass or Alain-Fournier a form of spiritual imprisonment?"
  • (16) His earliest surviving work, Rien que les heures (1926), took its cue from the surrealist notion that, viewed in the appropriate way, the most humdrum districts of a modern city such as Paris could be as exotic as anything shot in the Arctic or the Pacific.
  • (17) Gervais always believed you should write what you know, so when he sat down to create The Office with Stephen Merchant, he set it in the moribund Home Counties where he grew up, in a humdrum working environment not unlike the one where he’d spent the best part of a decade.
  • (18) As a linguist, he confessed himself to be humdrum, but wherever the English language prevailed, he could feel at home.
  • (19) At their best, soaps find drama in the everyday and the mark of Wainwright’s work is that, however dramatic, there is a respect for the drudgery and humdrum nature of much of life.
  • (20) Everton came close to extending their lead five minutes from the break, when a good shot by Séamus Coleman was matched by a diving save from Guzan, yet those highlights apart the first half was a fairly humdrum affair.

Monotonous


Definition:

  • (a.) Uttered in one unvarying tone; continued with dull uniformity; characterized by monotony; without change or variety; wearisome.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Increasing concentrations of cholesterol monotonically increase the dipole potential of egg phosphatidylcholine monolayers, from 415 mV with no cholesterol to 493 mV with equimolar cholesterol.
  • (2) "Weak" subjects tended to fall asleep more rapidly during monotonous stimulation, whereas the reverse was true of "strong" subjects.
  • (3) Although their increases were monotonic in a given heart, their sensitivities to catecholamines were considerably variable among hearts.
  • (4) For an "FM specialized" cell, the response pattern to each of the parameters was either monotonic or bell-shaped.
  • (5) The extent of Ca2+ uptake was monotonically increased as the pH increased from 6 to 9.
  • (6) Serum apolipoprotein A-I concentrations were unaltered, apolipoprotein A-II underwent a transient increase, and apolipoprotein B increased monotonically during parenteral nutrition.
  • (7) Critical features of the model include a non-monotonic relationship between recovery time during rhythmic stimulation and the state of membrane properties, and a steeply sloped recovery of membrane properties over certain ranges of recovery times.
  • (8) As subcritical crack velocities under cyclic loading were found to be many orders of magnitude faster than those measured under equivalent monotonic loads and to occur at typically 45% lower stress-intensity levels, cyclic fatigue in pyrolytic carbon-coated graphite is reasoned to be a vital consideration in the design and life-prediction procedures of prosthetic devices manufactured from this material.
  • (9) Pulsed-field electrophoresis experiments resulting in the establishment of an electrophoretic karyotype for yeast, where the mobility of the DNA fragments is a monotonic function of molecular size for the entire size range that is resolved (200-2200 kilobase pairs), has been compared to the theoretical mobility curves generated by the computer model.
  • (10) Input-output functions at inhibitory frequencies were nonmonotonic, while they were always monotonic at best frequencies near CF.
  • (11) Other consequences of increasing gNa+max were a decrease in the minimum sustainable rhythmic firing frequency (mRFF), a monotonic increase in firing frequency at any given suprathreshold stimulus intensity, an increase in the current value at which intense depolarizing stimuli block rhythmogenesis, an increase in the maximal sustainable firing frequency using intense currents (MRFF), and the consequent expansion of the dynamic range for stimulus encoding.
  • (12) The voltage dependences of the ON and OFF charges measured with these pulses were clearly different: QON had a maximum at or slightly above the contraction threshold, while QOFF increased monotonically in the voltage range examined.
  • (13) FNA smears from a lymph node in a patient with a previous histological diagnosis of lymphomatoid papulosis of the gingiva showed a monotonous pattern of large immunoblastic cells with some binucleated variants consistent with a diagnosis of high grade immunoblastic lymphoma, which was confirmed histologically.
  • (14) It is a monotonous, unreactive and anteriorly predominant activity of less than 50 microV and of 8 to 13 Hz.
  • (15) Several temporal principles that govern multisensory integration were revealed: (1) maximal levels of response enhancement were generated by overlapping the peak discharge periods evoked by each modality; (2) the magnitude of this enhancement decayed monotonically to zero as the peak discharge periods became progressively more temporally disparate; (3) with further increases in temporal disparity, the same stimulus combinations that previously produced enhancement could often produce depression; and (4) these kinds of interactions could frequently be predicted from the discharge trains initiated by each stimulus alone.
  • (16) Monotonic decreases in ambulation after tetrabenazine were not significantly affected in the rubidium-treated animals though the decreases were sometimes preceded by slight increases and recovery from the decrement tended to be more rapid.
  • (17) To estimate mechanical characteristics of such membranes, it is necessary to carry out the noncontact pressure test and membranous contact test, in addition to the usual monotonic tensile test, by using a rectangular specimen cut from the membranes.
  • (18) In cell-attached recordings the high-frequency component declined monotonically with increasing light intensity, suggesting that less than one-half of the channels are open in darkness.
  • (19) The strength of this genetic control, however, systematically diminished throughout the course of practice obeying a monotonic trend over trials.
  • (20) The open time had a monotonic mole fraction relationship in mixtures of Li+ and K+.