What's the difference between luck and pluck?

Luck


Definition:

  • (n.) That which happens to a person; an event, good or ill, affecting one's interests or happiness, and which is deemed casual; a course or series of such events regarded as occurring by chance; chance; hap; fate; fortune; often, one's habitual or characteristic fortune; as, good, bad, ill, or hard luck. Luck is often used for good luck; as, luck is better than skill.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) As luck would have it, the outgoing Bartlet and his successor, Matt Santos, are currently dealing with a foreign crisis, too.
  • (2) We can inhabit only one version of being human – the only version that survives today – but what is fascinating is that palaeoanthropology shows us those other paths to becoming human, their successes and their eventual demise, whether through failure or just sheer bad luck.
  • (3) Obama will meet with Binyamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas tomorrow as well, but US envoy George Mitchell has had no luck in recent weeks trying to persuade Netanyahu to compromise on the settlements.
  • (4) Song appeared to give Bolt a good luck charm to wear around his wrist.
  • (5) I thought we rode our luck in the first 20 minutes here.
  • (6) Good luck, rather than good genes, may be the key reason why some people are protected from certain cancers while others develop the disease, according to a new study.
  • (7) I wish he and Rosemary all the luck in the world...They should know there is much to enjoy in life even if you have been forced out because of circumstances.
  • (8) He said his longevity in the face of multiple drug abuse over decades was just luck, and advised others not to follow his lead.
  • (9) His previous strokes of luck include being appointed chief executive of the Olympic Delivery Authority, the highest-paid quango boss in the UK, and being knighted for "services to regeneration" despite not being a Time Lord.
  • (10) Seth Smith makes the final out of the A's season, which is a good luck charm for the Boston Red Sox, as Smith made the final out for the Colorado Rockies in the 2007 World Series that Boston won.
  • (11) Thom Majka, a sales rep who keeps his Indians cap on through every game for good luck, said: “These fans couldn’t care less about the election.
  • (12) Hugh Pennington, a microbiology expert, said on Saturday that luck will play a role in Cafferkey’s survival chances because experts still do not know enough about the virus.
  • (13) A ccents from every state in the union can be heard as workers pour off the train each day in Williston, North Dakota, ready to try their luck as the welders, truck drivers, plumbers, oil rig roughnecks, frackers, water carriers and road crews required to support the booming fracking industry – but also as plumbers, lawyers, cooks, accountants and everything else it takes to build a rapidly burgeoning city.
  • (14) So a striker needs also a bit of luck and then the confidence is higher but he’s self-confident so I expect he shall score and maybe against Chelsea .” So far Van Persie has remained injury free, which is a fillip after previously admitting to managing persistent issues for years.
  • (15) If the Spaniard’s bad luck in hitting a post was expected, the sight of Stambouli, a lumbering figure in the first 45 minutes, confidently sweeping home the rebound certainly prompted a double take.
  • (16) So tough luck for my friend Jennifer, who wanted to take an HND in plastering and brickwork.
  • (17) Good luck telling your manager you fancy a day off.
  • (18) Photograph: Alamy You’ll hear the traditional dance music pulsing out everywhere from dark bars, and seeing it involves decisions or luck.
  • (19) You'll find this helpful: How to get into media Best of luck!
  • (20) If that was a stroke of luck Everton were even luckier in the second half, when Joe Allen made his contribution to derby folklore with what may well be the miss of the season.

Pluck


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To pull; to draw.
  • (v. t.) Especially, to pull with sudden force or effort, or to pull off or out from something, with a twitch; to twitch; also, to gather, to pick; as, to pluck feathers from a fowl; to pluck hair or wool from a skin; to pluck grapes.
  • (v. t.) To strip of, or as of, feathers; as, to pluck a fowl.
  • (v. t.) To reject at an examination for degrees.
  • (v. i.) To make a motion of pulling or twitching; -- usually with at; as, to pluck at one's gown.
  • (n.) The act of plucking; a pull; a twitch.
  • (n.) The heart, liver, and lights of an animal.
  • (n.) Spirit; courage; indomitable resolution; fortitude.
  • (n.) The act of plucking, or the state of being plucked, at college. See Pluck, v. t., 4.
  • (v. t.) The lyrie.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) So Fifa left that group out and went ahead with the draw – according to legend, plucking names from the Jules Rimet trophy itself – and, after Belgium were chosen but decided not to participate, Wales came out next.
  • (2) The woman said it took her until the mid-1990s to pluck up the courage to report the abuse to Jersey's children's services department – and that her allegations were not taken seriously enough.
  • (3) Many of Long’s pieces are fragile and fleeting: a stripe of un-mown grass in an otherwise close cropped lawn at the Henry Moore foundation , a misty circle in Scotland that lasted only until the day warmed up, a stripe of green grass left by plucking daisies, or paintings in wet mud that dry out and crumble.
  • (4) They're partial to the odd eider duck and do lots of nifty fish-plucking from the waves.
  • (5) It described experiments in which skin cells plucked from mice were reprogrammed into what looked for all the world like embryonic stem cells.
  • (6) She said: "I have asked the migration advisory committee – and I am not going to pluck at figures from thin air – to look at these issues to see if we can get to a point where we can get a better assessment and a better judgment of the true picture, in relation to the costs or otherwise of the decisions that we are taking, because I do not believe that the impact assessment gives a full and true picture at the moment."
  • (7) Given how empty the sea is, it was a miracle that his distress signal, transmitted to the ever-watchful Falmouth Coastguard, was picked up by a Chinese supertanker whose crew plucked him from the water minutes before his boat sank.
  • (8) The various components of these muscles are provided with stiff as well as wide aponeuroses and tendons (much stronger than those observed in Columba), indicating forceful opening and closure of the beaks for plucking off the fruit, grasping it hard and manipulating it with the help of the beaks before swallowing.
  • (9) Usually but this time they're on their feet, plucking like workers in a chicken factory working on a bonus system for number of feathers plucked.
  • (10) Using the CRD, outer root sheath cells, isolated from plucked human hair follicles and plated on growth-arrested 3T3 feeder layers, were grown on native collagen lattices populated with living human fibroblasts.
  • (11) After this treatment, we plucked anagen hairs under standardized conditions both from the area treated with C and the contralateral, untreated area.
  • (12) The present study demonstrates the possibilities of DNA flow cytometry to study the pharmacological effects on cell kinetics of plucked human anagen hairs.
  • (13) I was much more comfortable with the data in Canada ( where he was governor before being plucked to run Threadneedle Street ), Carney replies .
  • (14) Dahl’s heroine, Sophie, is a lonely young girl plucked from her bed in an orphanage by the titular behemoth, and carried off to Giant Land, his home, lest she alert the normal world to the presence of giants.
  • (15) The number of carcasses which were positive after cooling was found to have decreased in poultry-processing plant B compared with the situation after plucking, whereas this number was not affected to any appreciable extent in processing plant A.
  • (16) Activities in both plucked and unplucked skin were higher in the animals fed diets with higher protein contents.
  • (17) counsels their mother, whose superb cheeriness and pluck are the things with which we truly built the empire), and seek out new friends and entertainments.
  • (18) Some boxing experts believe that, starting his career at light-middleweight against Hungary's Attila Molnar , Saunders will eventually emerge as the most successful of the trio Warren has plucked from the British Olympic team.
  • (19) Such organizations as Project Censored exist to call attention to, for instance, the "Top Censored Stories Corporate Media Won't Dare Touch" – pretty much all of which, of course, have been plucked from the corporate media.
  • (20) Rearing environment (enriched vs. normal) and method of vibrissae removal (cauterization of follicles vs. plucking) were examined to determine specific factors that m might influence the effect of vibrissae removal.