What's the difference between paean and pagan?

Paean


Definition:

  • (n.) An ancient Greek hymn in honor of Apollo as a healing deity, and, later, a song addressed to other deities.
  • (n.) Any loud and joyous song; a song of triumph.
  • (n.) See Paeon.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) American Horror Story is a paean to the supernatural whose greatest purpose is letting washed-up actors and pop stars chew the scenery on the way to winning awards .
  • (2) That seemed not to worry Unite's Len McCluskey, his erstwhile blustery critic, who sent out paeans of reckless praise: "This is a tour de force … the best speech from a Labour leader I have heard."
  • (3) The paeans served Blatter well and he was carried back into office, 139 votes to Hayatou's 56.
  • (4) A Brazilian World Cup that started amid fears over protests and corruption but became a paean to the best of international football concluded with a tense final and a dramatic denouement.
  • (5) Joseph O'Neill had already caused a stir with his first novel, Netherland; Niall Williams' overlooked paean to the joys of reading in the rain will now draw more attention.
  • (6) Children from the Robin Hood primary school in Birmingham sang in Mandarin at the event, and a student from Lancaster University Confucius Institute, Cameron Patterson, recited Xi’s paean to Jiao Yulu, a celebrated party leader in Henan province who died in 1964.
  • (7) The doyenne of good living this week wrote a paean to UAVs for Time magazine titled “ Why I love my drone ”.
  • (8) This much-publicised paean, written with input from people across the Netherlands, has been savaged in the press and social media for heartfelt lines such as: "I will build a dyke with my bare hands and keep you safe from the water."
  • (9) There are at least four problems with Chris Huhne’s paean to growth ( Comment , 25 August).
  • (10) Migrant worker delegate Ju Xiaolin shed tears while reading an original poem called Getting New Hope , a paean to president Hu Jintao's 64-page Thursday morning political report.
  • (11) The two albums that followed, I See A Darkness and Ease Down The Road, are his best, and most consistent, collections - the former dark and wintry; the latter, in contrast, is a veritable paean to the carnal joys of infidelity.
  • (12) None of this daunted Diodotus, whose counter-argument began with a paean to the power of debate: “The good citizen,” he insisted, “ought to triumph not by frightening his opponents, but by beating them fairly in argument.” And beat Cleon he did, in a series of detailed appeals to his audience, setting out his belief in how Athens’ long-term interests would best be served.
  • (13) The stuff that reinforced that image – I'm Waiting for the Man, Street Hassle, Dirt, Kicks, Sad Song – was matched by songs of real tenderness, not in the grudging tears-of-a-tough-guy style, but open and honest and touchingly fragile (see Femme Fatale's ruined suitor warning others off to Coney Island Baby , his lovestruck paean to Rachel, the beautiful drag queen who was his mid-70s companion ).
  • (14) Near Amir’s bed, they found a book titled Baruch the Man , a paean to Baruch Goldstein who had massacred 29 Palestinians as they worshipped in a mosque in Hebron.
  • (15) There was Petit Pays, Cesária Évora's beautiful paean to her native Cape Verde, and Chopin's Waltz in A Minor played by the Turkish pianist Idil Biret.
  • (16) Against the backdrop of a looming presidential poll pitting the Muslim Brotherhood against Ahmed Shafik, Mubarak's final prime minister and the man many Egyptians believe has been promoted by the military junta and the now-disbanded NDP party to crush the revolution, Refaat began his verdict with a florid paean of praise to those who died for freedom.
  • (17) It was a paean of praise to a traditional Communist hero called Jiao Yulu, a party leader from Henan province celebrated on a million propaganda posters for putting the needs of the ordinary working people before his own.
  • (18) I'd always be up for a revival of West Side Story, James Lapine and William Finn's Falsettos and Jason Robert Brown's brilliant Parade , but the show I long to see again is Stephen Sondheim's 1971 Follies, that aching paean to tarnished dreams and lost innocence set during the reunion of a bunch of Ziegfeld-style hoofers on the eve of the destruction of the theatre where they performed 30 years previously.
  • (19) To applause from an audience of Israeli political and other leaders, the US president delivered an uncritical paean of praise to Israel.
  • (20) It sounds like he’s been reading the Economist!” a journalist from that magazine said of Xi’s unlikely paean to liberal economics.

Pagan


Definition:

  • (n.) One who worships false gods; an idolater; a heathen; one who is neither a Christian, a Mohammedan, nor a Jew.
  • (n.) Of or pertaining to pagans; relating to the worship or the worshipers of false goods; heathen; idolatrous, as, pagan tribes or superstitions.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Professor Ronald Hutton , a leading expert on paganism based at Bristol University, said he believed there were at least 100,000 practising pagans in Britain.
  • (2) First, medicine was despised as a mechanical art or suspected of paganism because of its literary sources.
  • (3) Beltran moved to right field so that Pagan could play in center in New York to protect his knees.
  • (4) Pagan featured in one of the game's key plays, when a line drive hit the third base back and bounced away from Miguel Cabrera for a two-out double that eventually led to a three-run inning.
  • (5) The most famous image of suffering in the Renaissance was an ancient statue dug up in 1506 of the pagan priest Laocoön being strangled by snakes , his face a contorted image of pure suffering.
  • (6) This is a question which can be answered in entirely pagan ways, but there, too, you come up against something quite like the Christian problem of evil.
  • (7) 1.24am BST Cardinals 0 - Giants 0, Bottom 1st Angel Pagan, or Crazy Horse as he is sometimes known gets the crowd up by leading off the inning with a base hit to his old teammate, Carlos Beltran in right.
  • (8) The rookie shortstop boots it, bobbles it, picks it up and fires home and nails Angel Pagan who is trying to trot home!
  • (9) A recent proposal (Maggio, M. B., Pagan, J., Parsonage, D., Hatch, L., and Senior, A. E. (1987) J. Biol.
  • (10) 2.45am BST Giants 5 - Tigers 0, Bottom 4th Pagan grounds out to end the inning, but the Giants tack on another run at AT&T Park.
  • (11) Pagan can't check his swing on a slider out of the zone, 0-1.
  • (12) Boko Haram has repeatedly stated its opposition not only to western education - its name means western education is forbidden” in the Hausa language – but also to democracy and secular government, which it regards as a form of “paganism”, and its attacks could intensify to discourage voting.
  • (13) As a Christian, she is wrestling with the problem of other people's faiths, including paganism.
  • (14) Starting with standards arising from the relationship between medicine and art in classical antiquity, biblical tradition and teutonic-pagan antiquity, this article roams through german literature from the Middle Ages up to the 20th century, from Hildegard of Bingen to Gottfried Benn and Alfred Döblin, guided by the question, how strongly medical knowledge and medical practise are reflected in the poetry of writing physicians.
  • (15) Updated at 1.57am BST 1.51am BST Angel Pagan really is a Crazy Horse.
  • (16) In spite of the hookline ("Smother the fire … "), it retains a seasonally appropriate, huddled under pelts, Game Of Thrones vibe: slightly pagan, but definitely pleasantly warm.
  • (17) The Giants, who this week brutally lost their starting center fielder, Angel Pagan , for the season, to back surgery, have a mathematical chance at overtaking LA, but more likely will be fighting for home-field advantage in the NL wild-card game.
  • (18) 1.49am BST Giants 2 - Tigers 0, Top 2nd There are nervous cheers from the Detroit crowd after Pagan grounds out to Fielder at first to retire the side.
  • (19) One boy was told by his Isis commander: “Even if you see your father, if he is still Yazidi, you must kill him.” Isis has openly referred to the Yazidis as a “pagan minority [whose] existence … Muslims should question”, adding that “their women could be enslaved … as spoils of war”.
  • (20) On Tuesday, they accused liberal bishops of imposing a "neo-pagan worldview" by supporting gay marriage and claiming there should be "a recognition of God's grace at work in same-sex partnerships".