What's the difference between luxury and opulent?

Luxury


Definition:

  • (n.) A free indulgence in costly food, dress, furniture, or anything expensive which gratifies the appetites or tastes.
  • (n.) Anything which pleases the senses, and is also costly, or difficult to obtain; an expensive rarity; as, silks, jewels, and rare fruits are luxuries; in some countries ice is a great luxury.
  • (n.) Lechery; lust.
  • (n.) Luxuriance; exuberance.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In a BBC Radio 4 performance that attempts to underline his status as a normal bloke – although he admits he was too "square" to attract a girlfriend at university – Miliband's luxury item is a weekly chicken tikka masala from his local north London Indian takeaway.
  • (2) The commission heard AWH charged luxury accommodation in Queensland, limousine rides and Liberal party donations to Sydney Water.
  • (3) As an organisation rife with white privilege, Peta has the luxury of not having to consider the horror that such imagery would evoke.
  • (4) He reduced the standard rate to 8%, but introduced a higher rate of 12.5% for petrol and some luxury goods, doubling the upper rate later that year to 25% before lowering it in 1976.
  • (5) Likewise, Brynjolfsson doesn’t find the idea of machine-generated populist luxury outlandish.
  • (6) 'No social housing' boasts luxury London flat advert for foreign investors Read more Only by rebalancing housing provision can we avoid another bursting property bubble.
  • (7) Scheveningen's prison's spacious, individual cells and family rooms for visits may soon seem luxurious in comparison with the cold comfort of life behind bars in England.
  • (8) Although only a small section of the site has been excavated, there are baths, luxurious houses, an amphitheatre, a forum, shops, gardens with working fountains and city walls to explore, with many wonderful mosaics still in situ.
  • (9) 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".
  • (10) Those who bought "luxury' villas for €1m in the good times would be lucky to get a third for them now – if, that is, they could ever find a buyer happy to tolerate living on an unfinished complex.
  • (11) "You look at Tesco and Morrisons, they are feeling the effects, so it's no wonder I'm finding it hard to get people to buy what are effectively luxury items they don't really need."
  • (12) Not everybody has the luxury of being able to earn 20% less, but I wager more people could than do now.
  • (13) The dark, luxury air in the silent bedrooms of empty riverside apartments, their identical curving blocks clustered in threes and fours, grim and silent as gill slits, will be theirs.
  • (14) When Contostavlos wanted to stay an extra night at the luxury Las Vegas hotel, he told the court, his editors vetoed it.
  • (15) The leaders of the world's eight wealthiest countries, including Russian president Vladimir Putin and German chancellor Angela Merkel, are due to meet at the luxury Lough Erne resort in Co Fermanagh for the conference on 17-18 June.
  • (16) If you look around at how incredibly luxurious some base camps are, you can see their point," he said.
  • (17) While companies such as Google and luxury brands like Lexus have dominated the headlines with advances in driverless cars, Daimler board member Wolfgang Bernhard told reporters autonomous trucks were likely to hit the roads first.
  • (18) For luxury brands like Gucci, Prada and Burberry it is a way to clear unsold goods under the radar and McKenzie reveals that while fashion labels "don't like us to talk about them", they "make a ton of money out of their outlet businesses".
  • (19) Within the security of such luxury, it’s easy to laugh at Menstrual Hygiene Day.
  • (20) From his 19th-floor newsroom Eurípedes Alcântara enjoys a spectacular view over the "new Brazil"; helicopters flit through the afternoon sky, shiny new cars honk their way across town, tower blocks and luxury shopping centres sprout like turnips from the urban sprawl.

Opulent


Definition:

  • (a.) Having a large estate or property; wealthy; rich; affluent; as, an opulent city; an opulent citizen.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Mendl's candy colours contrast sharply with the gothic garb of our hero's enemies and the greys of the prison uniforms – as well as scenes showing the hotel later, in the 1960s, its opulence lost beneath a drab communist refurb.
  • (2) Using skills acquired in his first job with the accountancy giant PricewaterhouseCoopers and his second, buying and selling companies for JP Morgan, he minted a commercial model from the calm opulence of United's discreet Mayfair office that soon became the envy of the football world.
  • (3) For every cinephile that delights in Quentin Tarantino's penchant for opulent dialogue and magpie film-historian's eye, there's another who sees the US director of Reservoir Dogs , Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill movies as a garish charlatan who survives on a habit of plundering the past.
  • (4) The film attacked Luzhkov's opulent lifestyle and that of his wife, Yelena Baturina, the world's third richest woman.
  • (5) He laughs from a red leather chair in his gilded suite at the Foreign Office, the most opulent of ministerial quarters.
  • (6) This is a song so opulently miserable that it's almost a parody of heartbreak songs.
  • (7) Merkel was on Monday the first western leader to woo Erdoğan in his new presidential palace in Ankara, a widely mocked exercise in over-the-top opulence that cost a reported $600m (£415m) to build.
  • (8) The wedding was a characteristically opulent affair, with specially made china bearing the logo Prince had taken to using in lieu of a name in the wake of his rebellion against his record label, Warner Brothers (he was known publicly as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince at the time).
  • (9) The refurbishment of the Kensington Palace apartment for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, a renovation boosted by £4.5m of taxpayers' money, has made the space neither "lavish" nor "opulent" but just like "an ordinary family home", according to royal aides.
  • (10) On Sunday, almost a year after the internet entrepreneur and several of his associates were arrested in a spectacular dawn raid on the mansion, about 200 invited guests will gather at the opulent estate for the launch of Mega.
  • (11) This time, though, Valery Gergiev and co are not bringing one of their Russian specialities, but Die Frau ohne Schatten, the most opulent of Richard Strauss's operas.
  • (12) Relaxing in his opulent Thames-side penthouse apartment, the only BBC presenter to be openly critical of the former BBC Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas in the wake of the "Sachsgate" affair is as garrulous as ever.
  • (13) It is made of luxurious materials including silver and silk, with an ostrich feather and a neat row of holes that would once have carried an opulently jewelled hatband.
  • (14) But if you’re investor Carl Icahn, billionaire owner of Atlantic City’s decaying but still opulent, elephant-fronted Taj, you have some odds in your favor.
  • (15) Photograph: Victoria and Albert Museum The sheer opulence of the materials, including little pearls and gems stitched into the fabric, doomed many of the items when they fell out of fashion or favour after the Reformation and there were bonfires of precious fabrics to recover the gold and silver from the thread.
  • (16) Based on this information, a subsegment of the total area is delineated as a possible neighborhood for an office location and a physician-opulation ratio for this subsegment is determined.
  • (17) Flamboyant opulence and welfare-to-work, it's fair to say, are not the easiest of fits.
  • (18) I remember sitting in my parents’ council house in Carshalton and hearing about the incredibly opulent funeral of Queen Mary and thinking, no matter how rich or important you are, life always ends the same way.
  • (19) If you see a medieval city on screen today, chances are it was knocked up on a computer, and even as you watch it, all this on screen opulence – based on binary units of data – will look as convincing a year from now as the back-projection in Hitchcock's Marnie.
  • (20) The former Fifa vice-president Jeffrey Webb has provided 11 luxury watches to secure the $10m (£6.4m) bond that enabled his release from custody, along with his wife’s wedding ring, three opulent cars and 10 properties.