What's the difference between persuade and prove?

Persuade


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To influence or gain over by argument, advice, entreaty, expostulation, etc.; to draw or incline to a determination by presenting sufficient motives.
  • (v. t.) To try to influence.
  • (v. t.) To convince by argument, or by reasons offered or suggested from reflection, etc.; to cause to believe.
  • (v. t.) To inculcate by argument or expostulation; to advise; to recommend.
  • (v. i.) To use persuasion; to plead; to prevail by persuasion.
  • (n.) Persuasion.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Gordon Brown believes that the fact of the G20 summit has persuaded many tax havens, such as Switzerland and Liechtenstein, to indicate that they will adopt a more open approach.
  • (2) An official from Cafcass, the children and family court advisory service, tried to persuade the child in several interviews, but eventually the official told the court that further persuasion was inappropriate and essentially abusive.
  • (3) She kept it up for three years, until her son's letters finally persuaded her to cut down to one day a week.
  • (4) We simply do whatever nature needs and will work with anyone that wants to help wildlife.” His views might come as a surprise to some of the RSPB’s 1.1 million members, who would have been persuaded by its original pledge “to discourage the wanton destruction of birds”; they would equally have been a surprise to the RSPB’s detractors in the shooting world.
  • (5) That refusal seems to have persuaded Apple's team, which has been core to the development of WebKit since using it for the Safari browser, released in January 2003, to introduce WebKit2 earlier this year which did offer that capability.
  • (6) It seeks to acquaint them with 'ethical' arguments against their work which, because they are simple and plausible, persuade many people.
  • (7) Obama will meet with Binyamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas tomorrow as well, but US envoy George Mitchell has had no luck in recent weeks trying to persuade Netanyahu to compromise on the settlements.
  • (8) The charity Bite the Ballot , which persuaded hundreds of thousands to register before the last general election, is to set up “democracy cafes” in Starbucks branches, laying on experts to explain how to register and vote, and what the referendum is all about (Bite the Ballot does not take sides but merely encourages participation).
  • (9) The writer John Lanchester concedes that democracies will always need spies, but reading the Snowden documents persuaded him that piecing together habits of thought from internet searches takes things far beyond conventional spying: “Google doesn’t just know you’re gay before you tell your mum; it knows you’re gay before you do.
  • (10) But Richard Hall, director of infrastructure at Consumer Futures, a consumer watchdog, said Ofgem had "produced a lot of evidence that would persuade a third party that there is a trend [of rising prices]".
  • (11) McCain, a former Republican presidential candidate with an influential voice on US foreign affairs, is seen by the Obama administration as a potentially important intermediary in its intensive push to persuade Congress to swing behind the plan for airstrikes .
  • (12) According to Deborah Mattinson, his pollster, Brown " loved slogans and believed them to be imbued with a mystical power capable of persuading the most intransigent voter", and therefore went a bundle on them – not least " A future fair for all ", the surreal dud with which Labour went to the country in 2010, following 2005's equally idiotic " forward not back ".
  • (13) For a while North Korea refused to play, but after delicate negotiations the players were persuaded back on to the pitch and the correct flag was displayed alongside the team photos.
  • (14) When the owners of Manchester City finally managed to persuade Pep Guardiola to oversee the next stage of their masterplan it is fair to say they probably did not expect to be approaching Christmas scuffling with a team of Watford’s limitations for their first league win at home in almost three months.
  • (15) He has some suggestions for what might be done, including easing changing the planning laws to free up parts of the green belt, financial incentives to persuade local authorities to build, and the replacement of the council tax and stamp duty land tax with a new local property tax with automatic annual revaluations.
  • (16) Even if nobody switched party, the general election result would look very different to what’s predicted if millennials could be persuaded to vote at the same rate as pensioners, as polls factor in turnout differences and oversample the elderly accordingly.
  • (17) For some people, free cash will persuade them to take the plunge.
  • (18) The fact that the leave campaign are getting things as straightforward as this wrong should call into judgment the bigger argument about leaving the EU.” He said out campaigners were trying to persuade people to vote for Brexit solely on the back of an issue “that is not true”.
  • (19) We had already persuaded him to give us a little extra time, telling him we would both pay him on a particular day, but when that day rolled around, neither of us had the money.
  • (20) Nonetheless, the NSA persuaded Erwin Griswold, the former dean of Harvard law school, the then solicitor general of the United States, to knowingly lie to the United States supreme court that it was still a secret.

Prove


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To try or to ascertain by an experiment, or by a test or standard; to test; as, to prove the strength of gunpowder or of ordnance; to prove the contents of a vessel by a standard measure.
  • (v. t.) To evince, establish, or ascertain, as truth, reality, or fact, by argument, testimony, or other evidence.
  • (v. t.) To ascertain or establish the genuineness or validity of; to verify; as, to prove a will.
  • (v. t.) To gain experience of the good or evil of; to know by trial; to experience; to suffer.
  • (v. t.) To test, evince, ascertain, or verify, as the correctness of any operation or result; thus, in subtraction, if the difference between two numbers, added to the lesser number, makes a sum equal to the greater, the correctness of the subtraction is proved.
  • (v. t.) To take a trial impression of; to take a proof of; as, to prove a page.
  • (v. i.) To make trial; to essay.
  • (v. i.) To be found by experience, trial, or result; to turn out to be; as, a medicine proves salutary; the report proves false.
  • (v. i.) To succeed; to turn out as expected.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) During the performance of propulsive waves of the oesophagus the implanted vagus nerve caused clonic to tetanic contractions of the sternohyoid muscle, thus proving the oesophagomotor genesis of the reinnervating nerve fibres.
  • (2) Treatment termination due to lack of efficacy or combined insufficient therapeutic response and toxicity proved to be influenced by the initial disease activity and by the rank order of prescription.
  • (3) "The Samaras government has proved to be dangerous; it cannot continue handling the country's fate."
  • (4) 119 representatives of this population were checked in their sexual contacts; of these, 13 persons proved to be infected with HIV.
  • (5) Basing the prediction of student performance in medical school on intellective-cognitive abilities alone has proved to be more pertinent to academic achievement than to clinical practice.
  • (6) Well tolerated from the clinical and laboratory points of view, it proved remarkably effective.
  • (7) It arguably became too comfortable for Rodgers' team, with complacency and slack defending proving a dangerous brew.
  • (8) She was organised, good with people, very grown up and quickly proved herself to be indispensable.
  • (9) Proving that not all teens are content with being part of a purely digital community, Adele Mayr attended a YouTube meet-up in London’s Hyde Park.
  • (10) Gamma-irradiated splenic homogenates of armadillos infected with M. leprae proved sterile by conventional tests and media.
  • (11) None of the compounds proved active against the replication of retroviruses (human immunodeficiency virus, murine sarcoma virus) at concentrations that were not toxic to the host cells.
  • (12) A polypotent mechanism of the stimulating effect of fibronectin instillations during all the stages of the reparative process in the corneal tissue was proved.
  • (13) Platelet survival time in patients with Crohn's disease proved to be significantly shortened (p less than 0.001), whereas platelet turnover appeared augmented.
  • (14) The data obtained from all groups proved to be consistent.
  • (15) A newborn presenting with persistent umbilical stump bleeding should be screened for factor XIII deficiency when routine coagulation tests prove normal.
  • (16) Treatment was monitored by simple measurements, and it's toxicity proved to be scanty.
  • (17) The resistance proved to be directly dependent upon the specific antisense RNA and to be inversely proportional to the multiplicity of infecting polyoma.
  • (18) Accordingly, LPA proved an extremely stable characteristic which did not show any substantial variations in the course of five years.
  • (19) The obtained protein fraction proved to be a glycoprotein according to the positive staining with periodic acid Schiff.
  • (20) The consequences of proved hypersensitivity in patients with metal-to-plastic prostheses, either present prior to insertion of the prosthesis or evoked by the implant material, are not known.