What's the difference between machete and sword?

Machete


Definition:

  • (n.) A large heavy knife resembling a broadsword, often two or three feet in length, -- used by the inhabitants of Spanish America as a hatchet to cut their way through thickets, and for various other purposes.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Groups of men with machetes have been roaming the ruins seeking supplies of food or water.
  • (2) Plainclothes soldiers, one of them with a plastic-handled kitchen knife in the pocket of his shorts and a machete visible under his football shirt stopped and questioned any outsiders.
  • (3) In response, predominantly Christian forces known as the anti-balaka (balaka means machete in Sango, the local language) launched counterattacks against the Seleka and perceived Muslim collaborators.
  • (4) Blakelock, while on the ground, suffered eight machete wounds to the scalp, a knife driven into the back of the mouth with only the handle visible, 13 knife wounds to the back of the body, and wounds to his hands and arms.
  • (5) The corporation received 43 complaints after Robinson used the phrase on BBC1's 6pm bulletin on Wednesday, hours after the savage machete attack that killed a serving soldier in London .
  • (6) Eighty-two-year-old Richard “Buddy” Weaver was killed by Oklahoma City police after he allegedly raised a machete at an officer who opened fire; neighbors later described Weaver as having schizophrenia.
  • (7) Government workers with machetes cleared fallen trees from streets while a vast number of uninhabitable houses prompted residents to erect makeshift shelters.
  • (8) She had been slashed with a machete, hit on the head, thrown into a hole and raped.
  • (9) The Haitian in whose house in Port-au-Prince we are staying – a prominent businessman and generally very pro-America – keeps a cherished machete on his wall.
  • (10) Robert Doggart, 63, and a former candidate for Congress, said he wanted to take his “battle-tested M-4” military-style assault rifle, “with 500 rounds of ammunition, light-armor piercing”, a pistol with three extra magazines and a machete to burn down “the kitchen, the mosque and their school” in the hamlet of Islamberg, according to a criminal complaint against him.
  • (11) He thwacks his machete into a stump to free his hands and reaches over a stone wall, groping for something in the vegetation beneath.
  • (12) Chaves is a rough, tough, durable fighter who is very dangerous,” said Brook, who was unable to fight for almost seven months prior to beating Dan in March, having been stabbed in the leg with a machete while on holiday in Tenerife last September.
  • (13) As interahamwe leader Adalbert Munzigura told Hatzfeld in A Time For Machetes: "They needed intoxication, like someone who calls louder and louder for a bottle.
  • (14) On 1 March, black-clad assailants killed 29 people with knives and machetes at a train station in the south-western city of Kunming.
  • (15) Michelle had been walking along the road in the village of Monjas, in Jalapa, about 50 miles from Guatemala City, when a man on a motorcycle pulled up alongside her with a machete tied to his thigh.
  • (16) Frances Toor, whose work had always been supported or at least tolerated by successive governments, began to fear that the new, highly conservative and anti-left government would close down her Mexican Folkways, as El Machete had been closed down by the government in 1929 (though it continued to be published, illegally, from 1929 to 1934).
  • (17) "If I'm checking IDs at roadblocks, knowing that person is going to be clubbed to death, I'm as responsible as if I wielded the machete myself," said Capin.
  • (18) Witnesses claimed that some of the miners were armed with pistols and fired first, while also charging the police with machetes and sticks.
  • (19) Vigilantes armed with machetes and clubs blocked the road leading away from the compound, stopping cars to prevent looters from driving off with heavy weapons.
  • (20) Two years later, it was there that he was hacked to death by half a dozen machete-wielding men.

Sword


Definition:

  • (n.) An offensive weapon, having a long and usually sharp/pointed blade with a cutting edge or edges. It is the general term, including the small sword, rapier, saber, scimiter, and many other varieties.
  • (n.) Hence, the emblem of judicial vengeance or punishment, or of authority and power.
  • (n.) Destruction by the sword, or in battle; war; dissension.
  • (n.) The military power of a country.
  • (n.) One of the end bars by which the lay of a hand loom is suspended.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Everyone is expecting them to win and I think that’s a double-edged sword.
  • (2) Snipers fired from rooftops, and plainclothes Saleh supporters armed with automatic rifles, swords and batons attacked the protesters.
  • (3) The Broken King by Philip Womack Photograph: Troika Books The Sword in the Stone begins with Wart on a "quest" to find a tutor.
  • (4) In his book Swords and Ploughshares, Ashdown gives us two insights.
  • (5) Its sword-shaped columns tower up almost 100 feet, and grey concrete walls careen around its nearly half-mile circumference.
  • (6) This was a double-edged sword, for the futebol nation has displayed both the successes of the era and its limits.
  • (7) His charge sheet includes numerous assaults (one against a waiter who served him the wrong dish of artichokes); jail time for libelling a fellow painter, Giovanni Baglione, by posting poems around Rome accusing him of plagiarism and calling him Giovanni Coglione (“Johnny Bollocks”); affray (a police report records Caravaggio’s response when asked how he came by a wound: “I wounded myself with my own sword when I fell down these stairs.
  • (8) In a sign that Fox's decision to fall on his sword will not mark the end of the furore engulfing the Tories, both Liberal Democrat and Labour politicians stepped up their demands for the prime minister to explain why several senior members of his cabinet were involved in an Anglo-American organisation apparently at odds with his party's environmental commitments and pledge to defend free healthcare.
  • (9) If so, ministers may need to be prepared for a new breed of civil servants, who will no longer fall on their swords if they believe they have been stabbed in the back.
  • (10) This paper will give evidence of the exact wounds that Pizarro received in his final sword fight, as well as a facial sculpture of the skull now identified as that of the conqueror of Peru.
  • (11) Algeria deserved a better fate than an exit which inevitably will leave big regrets that they missed out on something monumental or unreal, but the national team left the Brazilian World Cup with sword in hand and head high.” In Germany most of the media were just thankful they had progressed.
  • (12) When you play music like that, it’s like being attacked with knives and swords,” he said.
  • (13) On the surface of course one can hardly blame them, given the difference in resources on either side – imagine, if you will, how much Arjen Robben or Van Persie would’ve enjoyed themselves had they played an open and adventurous system with designs on putting the Dutch to the sword.
  • (14) The European Union and the International Monetary Fund had handed enormous power to the Greeks, Parsons argued, just as Theseus handed power to Hippolyta by agreeing to lay down his sword.
  • (15) Long-term problems remain for new buyers looking to leave the rental market, and Funding for Lending is proving a double-edged sword.
  • (16) In the end the paper-clip turned out to be mightier than the sword.
  • (17) We really didn’t want to vote for it, but we made a mistake and now we’re trying to do what’s right and correct it.” But their letter also said while the intent of their vote “was to create a shield for all citizens’ religious liberties, the bill has been mischaracterized by its opponents as a sword for religious intolerance”.
  • (18) Police were ordered to apologise in person last year to an elderly blind man who was shot with a Taser electronic weapon after they mistook his white stick for a samurai sword.
  • (19) In subsequent years, armed with his trusty sword, Excalibur (a superannuated prop from John Boorman 's film of the same name), he persistently challenged the law against assembling at Stonehenge, while the site itself grew increasingly to resemble one of the military encampments on nearby Salisbury Plain.
  • (20) Swords IV was made by professional film-makers, al-Janabi also claims – and independent observers think he might be right.

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