What's the difference between ingenious and subtle?

Ingenious


Definition:

  • (a.) Possessed of genius, or the faculty of invention; skillful or promp to invent; having an aptitude to contrive, or to form new combinations; as, an ingenious author, mechanic.
  • (a.) Proseeding from, pertaining to, or characterized by, genius or ingenuity; of curious design, structure, or mechanism; as, an ingenious model, or machine; an ingenious scheme, contrivance, etc.
  • (a.) Witty; shrewd; adroit; keen; sagacious; as, an ingenious reply.
  • (a.) Mental; intellectual.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Committees too often rubber stamp these ingenious schemes with little real scrutiny.
  • (2) The 700-strong trade mission to Emperor Qianlong sailed in a man-of-war equipped with 66 guns, compromising diplomats, businessmen and soldiers, but it ended in an impasse with the emperor refusing to meet them, saying: "We the celestial empire have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country's manufactures."
  • (3) Few measures have elicited more anger – or ingenious forms of revolt – than the property tax announced by Greek ministers to plug a budget black hole that might have gone unnoticed had Greece's plight not threatened the entire eurozone.
  • (4) Gardner has plentiful contacts, a 22-strong network of local churches and ingenious ways of attracting food donations from all parts of the local community.
  • (5) The future is defined by the same old atavistic carnage as ever – which is, as Rosenbaum says, “an ingenious form of doublethink echoed in the very premise of a fantasy of the future beginning with “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ...” Star Wars cast feel the Force after watching new trailer Read more I don’t hate Star Wars – I love the puppetry, just for starters, and all those beautifully dirty, scum-caked robots.
  • (6) But arguably neither is scrapping them, since – even if you could somehow get a political mandate to scrap every private and grammar school in Britain tomorrow – parents would always find a way to game the system; we’d still have selection by house price, or by willingness to feign religious conviction, or some other ingenious new wheeze.
  • (7) The film was backed by an ingenious advertising campaign in which each Python recruited either a relative or friend (Gilliam's mum, Michael Palin's dentist) to present their own radio spot.
  • (8) To deal with this, she adopted an ingenious strategy.
  • (9) Bung enough money at a sufficiently ingenious lawyer and you’re in the club.
  • (10) Then he ingeniously got his bank to give him a loan to open up a fitness club (he advertised in the local paper saying he was opening a club, and membership was free, he got a huge response, then told the bank manager he already had 500 members).
  • (11) The predilection of such lesions to rupture, with resultant hemorrhage, thrombosis, and distal ischemia, has led to constant attempts at surgical management, including ligation and incision, wrapping, wiring, plasticizing, packing, obliterative and reconstructive endoaneurysmorrhaphy, and a wide variety of procedures both ingenious and ingenuous.
  • (12) His style plays to Peter Mandelson's ingenious line (which I don't think Lord Mandelson believes in for a moment) that Cameron is plastic to Gordon Brown's granite .
  • (13) The bombs were so ingenious that they would have evaded airport security.
  • (14) The rich find ingenious ways to avoid paying taxes.
  • (15) That might be the case in the Premier League, though the theory was made to look as shaky as some of the United defending by the superbly mobile and bewitchingly ingenious Barcelona attack.
  • (16) By this shape of holidays the partical sphere of the process of training and education, namely the qualification of those oligophren ones in spending an ingenious leisure, should be noticed and contributed to educating those imbecile boys and girls, who are participating their holidays in a camp for their "relative independence*.
  • (17) What this means is that a truly fascinating picture by Rubens – his fantastical, ingenious portrait of Marchesa aria Grimaldi, and her Dwarf (c 1606) in which a ruff collar takes on the proportions and complexity of the Milky Way and the beautiful Grimaldi is closely accompanied by her jowly retainer – is shown among a host of lesser works.
  • (18) The bladderwort ( utricularia ), incognito like a snapdragon, has an ingenious underground lair, vacuum-sucking insects to chambers where they are acidified; pitchers are outwardly passive, but inside their cavernous depths float a mass of drowned flies.
  • (19) The description of the dependences of consumption coefficients by thermodynamics of irreversible processes allows an ingenious statement of calorimetric measurements of the fermentation process to confirm and to make precise the knowledge deduced from thermodynamics.
  • (20) Regardless of cause, the treatment of an edentulous patient with microstomia is difficult and often ingenious.

Subtle


Definition:

  • (superl.) Sly in design; artful; cunning; insinuating; subtile; -- applied to persons; as, a subtle foe.
  • (superl.) Cunningly devised; crafty; treacherous; as, a subtle stratagem.
  • (superl.) Characterized by refinement and niceness in drawing distinctions; nicely discriminating; -- said of persons; as, a subtle logician; refined; tenuous; sinuous; insinuating; hence, penetrative or pervasive; -- said of the mind; its faculties, or its operations; as, a subtle intellect; a subtle imagination; a subtle process of thought; also, difficult of apprehension; elusive.
  • (superl.) Smooth and deceptive.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) As a group, the three mammalian proteins resemble bovine serum conglutinin and behave as lectins with rather broad sugar specificities directed at certain non-reducing terminal N-acetylglucosamine, mannose, glucose and fucose residues, but with subtle differences in fine specificities.
  • (2) But it will be a subtle difference, because it's already abundantly clear there's no danger of the war being suddenly forgotten, or made to seem irrelevant to our sense of what Europe and the world has to avoid repeating.
  • (3) Communicating sustainability is a subtle attempt at doing good Read more And yet, in environmental terms it is infinitely preferable to prevent waste altogether, rather than recycle it.
  • (4) If, indeed, there is an immunologic basis for pre-eclampsia, it is more subtle than the methodology used in this study is capable of detecting.
  • (5) Subtle differences between Chicago urban and Grand Forks rural climates are reflected in arthritic subjects' degree of pain and their perception of pain-related stress.
  • (6) Critical in this understanding are the subtle changes that occur in the individual patient, reflecting the natural history of the disease or response to its treatment.
  • (7) Subtle cognitive deficits in Inferential Reading Comprehension were detected when Reading Vocabulary was at or better than a twelfth grade level.
  • (8) This histochemical difference corresponded to more subtle differences in Nissl and myelin staining patterns, and suggests further structural subdivisions of potential functional significance.
  • (9) Thus, luciferase transcriptional fusions can detect subtle variations in initial rates of gene expression in a real-time, nondestructive assay.
  • (10) The binding of [3H]PAF to washed human platelets indicated subtle changes between Days 2 and 4, which became more noticeable by Day 6.
  • (11) In this study the temperature dependence of the reactivity of aldolase SH groups is investigated in order to detect subtle changes in the enzyme conformation.
  • (12) The crucial issue of whether subtle behavioral, intellectual, and developmental impairment occurs in young children, as a result of lead-induced CNS damage is discussed in detail.
  • (13) Historically, what made SNL’s campaign coverage so necessary was its ability to highlight the subtle absurdities of the election and exaggerate the ridiculous.
  • (14) It is believed that by looking at such subtle shape differences an understanding of what it means morphologically for a primate to be either more or less arboreal may be achieved.
  • (15) The current magnetic resonance imaging system with computerized image processing is a sensitive and simple method for evaluation of subtle parenchymal changes of the brain.
  • (16) Fundus examination disclosed a subtle cherry red spot bilaterally.
  • (17) Ependymal cells developed luminal fronds that projected into the ventricle and the subpial glia displayed a very subtle gliosis in the form of thin multi-laminated processes.
  • (18) The rapidity of obtaining the results (within one hour), the complete absence of untoward reactions to the radiopharmaceuticals, the much lower frequency of subtle or indeterminate results, the ability to render useful information in the presence of moderate jaundice and the lack of interference from overlying intestinal contents establishes these radionuclide agents as superior to both radiographic oral and intravenous cholangiography in the investigation of the acute abdomen.
  • (19) Moreover, subtle improvements observed in earlier investigations were not confirmed.
  • (20) Various compounds show subtle but significant differences in blood clearance, excretion, and soft-tissue uptake.