What's the difference between overthrow and subvert?

Overthrow


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To throw over; to overturn; to upset; to turn upside down.
  • (v. t.) To cause to fall or to fail; to subvert; to defeat; to make a ruin of; to destroy.
  • (n.) The act of overthrowing; the state of being overthrow; ruin.
  • (n.) The act of throwing a ball too high, as over a player's head.
  • (n.) A faulty return of the ball by a fielder, so that the striker makes an additional run.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "They have a retaliatory doctrine," Salah argued of the police, whose brutality was a major cause of Egypt's 2011 uprising , but who have become more popular after backing Morsi's overthrow.
  • (2) said a colleague, referring to the former Chadian dictator, who had been living in gilded exile in Dakar since his overthrow in December 1990.
  • (3) Every now and again a leader would promise to reform the system, but it survived, even after upheavals as great as that represented by the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.
  • (4) What goes on in The Handmaid’s Tale [the overthrow of the US government by a theocratic dictatorship that suppresses the rights of women] is actually confined to what used to be the United States.
  • (5) The overthrow of the Greek government so that (German finance minister Wolfgang) Schaüble could claim Tsipras’s head as a trophy.
  • (6) Syria’s five-year conflict has taken on an ethnic dimension, with Kurdish groups carving out their own regions and periodically battling groups from Syria’s Arab majority, whose priority is to overthrow Assad.
  • (7) Earlier this primary season, Tea Party-aligned candidates lost a series of high-profile battles, including in Georgia, North Carolina and Kentucky, where there was a failed attempt to overthrow the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell.
  • (8) Sunday's exodus further partitions the country, a process that has been under way since January, when a Muslim rebel government gave up power nearly a year after overthrowing the president of a decade.
  • (9) For those who believed that overthrowing communism would bring immediate prosperity and right the wrongs of the past, the fact that they were still poor while communist officials profited from the transition made it seem like the old order had not really been overthrown.
  • (10) This is certainly not what Libya was meant to become after the overthrow of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
  • (11) The US had previously signalled its tacit support for the military's actions by giving the go-ahead for the jets' delivery , and by avoiding terming Morsi's overthrow as a coup.
  • (12) The defeated candidate in last month's tense presidential election in Sri Lanka , General Sarath Fonseka, was arrested today at his office in Colombo and is to be charged with attempting a military coup to overthrow the government.
  • (13) In the meantime, Washington is expanding its military presence where it has control (for example, Honduras), and is ready to support the overthrow of left governments when the opportunity arises ( Honduras in 2009 , and Paraguay last year ).
  • (14) Richard Sewell's diary reveals that he and New Zealand ambassador Chris Beeby were closely involved with the ambitious plot to fly the US diplomats to safety at a time when anti-American rhetoric was at an all-time high following the overthrow of the Shah and Washington's decision to harbour its dying ally.
  • (15) But I’m glad it’s finally happened.” Malcolm Turnbull promises new style of leadership after overthrowing Abbott Read more It’s a new day in Australia, with a new prime minister-elect .
  • (16) Jang Song-thaek, previously one of the country's most powerful men, was accused of everything from plotting to overthrow the state to instigating disastrous currency reforms and dishing out pornography in the report from official news agency KCNA.
  • (17) Sabbahi's declaration has already split the leadership of Tamarod, the high-profile protest movement that led calls for Mohamed Morsi's overthrow last summer.
  • (18) Hundreds of policemen and soldiers have been killed during a low-level insurgency that has continued since the overthrow of ex-president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.
  • (19) A Muslim Brotherhood-led coalition has planned nationwide protests after Friday prayers as part of their near-daily demonstrations against the overthrow of Morsi and the recent vote on the country's rewritten constitution.
  • (20) The phrase "terrors of the earth" is Arthur Schlesinger's, in his quasi-official biography of Robert Kennedy, who was assigned responsibility to conduct the terrorist war, and informed the CIA that the Cuban problem carries "the top priority in the United States Government – all else is secondary – no time, no effort, or manpower is to be spared" in the effort to overthrow the Castro regime.

Subvert


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To overturn from the foundation; to overthrow; to ruin utterly.
  • (v. t.) To pervert, as the mind, and turn it from the truth; to corrupt; to confound.
  • (v. i.) To overthrow anything from the foundation; to be subversive.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In such conditions, proposals which subvert fundamental academic principles meet no effective opposition.
  • (2) His reports alleged active, sustained and covert collusion to subvert the election which, if confirmed, could constitute treason.
  • (3) This is the first such virally-encoded soluble cytokine receptor to be identified, and may represent a more general mechanism by which viruses subvert the host immune system.
  • (4) He told the court: “We have been trying at the bar to imagine whether we can think of any other group of legal or natural persons, terrorist suspects, arms dealers, Jews, in respect of whose evidence one might even begin to think that one could tenably say, ‘Well, of course, in looking at this evidence I have been very careful because I know from the past that these people are a bit devious and a bit unworthy, and the only thing they’re really interested in is subverting public health.’ ” Yet last week’s judgment, running to 1,000 paragraphs, confirmed in excoriating detail just how determined big tobacco has been down the decades to achieve precisely this goal.
  • (5) Liu is serving 11 years for incitement to subvert state power after co-writing Charter 08, a call for democratic reforms in China.
  • (6) China is furious at the decision to recognise Liu, jailed for incitement to subvert state power after co-authoring a call for democratic reforms.
  • (7) Mona Deeley, a producer for Cinema Badila: Alternative Cinema on BBC Arabic TV , said: "The secret cinema is an interesting initiative for both subverting the ban on cinema and as a form of civil and cultural resistance."
  • (8) These findings, together with the fact that the worm's gut contains hemosiderin, suggest that the worm subverts the vascular reaction and causes within the nodule a controlled hemorrhage that serves the worm's nutritional needs.
  • (9) No wry observations or whoops-a-daisy trombones to subvert the conceit for period lolz.
  • (10) It claimed to be the minutes of a late 19th-century meeting of Jewish leaders, in which they discussed their goal of a global plan to subvert the morals of gentiles and control the press and the global economy.
  • (11) It was our moment to make our point by subverting the message using the show itself.” In an early meeting with the production team, they were, the statement claims, handed images of “pro-Assad graffiti – apparently natural in a Syrian refugee camp”.
  • (12) The attack on al-Jazeera is part of an assault on free speech to subvert the impact of old and new media in the Arab world.
  • (13) Government inspections of garment factories are infrequent and easily subverted by corruption, and the garment industry, by far Bangladesh's biggest exporter, is highly influential in government.
  • (14) One year later, a court sentenced him to 11 years for incitement to subvert state power.
  • (15) "The bottom line is that we're all unique individuals – even when I'm trying to imitate Mariah, it's still through my lens," she explains when we get on to the subject of subverting pop for the masses.
  • (16) "He repeatedly sacrificed his own interests, even his liberty, in order to defend these values and challenge and subvert the most powerful factions that were their enemies," Greenwald wrote.
  • (17) And particularly once you start splitting them over jurisdictions and things like that it becomes much more difficult to subvert their intentions.
  • (18) We speculate that a major mechanism by which some oncogenes promote metastatic ability is by subverting a signal transduction process, resulting in activation of a set of genes, some of which appear to promote metastatic ability.
  • (19) But Thorne’s working life has been spent subverting genres, through his Bafta-winning work on supernatural thriller The Fades and Shane Meadows’s bleak, beautiful coming-of-age miniseries This Is England ’86 and ’88.
  • (20) His adrenalin-pumping shows are woven into American life, yet subvert its capitalist fundamentals, that innate American principle of screw-thy-neighbour, in favour of what he insists to be "real" America – working class, militant, street-savvy, tough but romantic, nomadic but with roots – compiled into what feels like a single epic but vernacular rock-opera lasting four decades.