What's the difference between meretricious and whorish?

Meretricious


Definition:

  • (a.) Of or pertaining to prostitutes; having to do with harlots; lustful; as, meretricious traffic.
  • (a.) Resembling the arts of a harlot; alluring by false show; gaudily and deceitfully ornamental; tawdry; as, meretricious dress or ornaments.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It was the hangover of a meretricious general election.
  • (2) Hugh Trevor-Roper denounced it as this "meretricious, misleading work".
  • (3) To pretend otherwise is self-indulgent and meretricious.
  • (4) The campaign against next week's election of police commissioners is meretricious.
  • (5) "There is now a disproportionate amount of meretricious material aimed at appealing to public prurience, most of which revolves around the philandering of celebrities," he argues.
  • (6) Of course, even thinking in these crude competitive "scoresheet" terms is a very un-Serious thing to be doing, and the admirers of 12 Years a Slave may have a sinking feeling that it will not be properly rewarded in the tinselly, meretricious, un-Serious Oscar world.
  • (7) There is now a disproportionate amount of meretricious material aimed at appealing to public prurience, most of which revolves around the philandering of celebrities.
  • (8) Almost like the protagonist of a Victorian novel, Sharif was overtaken by his own success, to the extent that in order to service the debts incurred by gambling and a playboy lifestyle, he was thrown back on accepting any work that came his way, and entered a downward spiral into trivial and meretricious movies.
  • (9) Churchill's grandson, the Conservative MP Winston Churchill , wrote to Armstong worried that "my grandfather's wartime diary appears to have fallen into the hands of this meretricious historian, David Irving."
  • (10) Novels that sparkled in the summer sun will seem flashy and meretricious in the sober light of autumn.

Whorish


Definition:

  • (a.) Resembling a whore in character or conduct; addicted to unlawful pleasures; incontinent; lewd; unchaste.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) If they tell a man they just want sex, they fear the man will see them as whorish, and that the usual standards of humanity and basic respect may not apply.

Words possibly related to "whorish"