What's the difference between petty and spiteful?

Petty


Definition:

  • (superl.) Little; trifling; inconsiderable; also, inferior; subordinate; as, a petty fault; a petty prince.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The only thing the media will talk about in the hours and days after the debate will be Trump’s refusal to say he will accept the results of the election, making him appear small, petty and conspiratorial.
  • (2) I realize it’s petty, but it’s like the Michael Bolton thing from Office Space.
  • (3) Winston Churchill, when he was offered the role of minister of the local government board in 1906, commented: "There is no place more laborious, more anxious, more thankless, more cloaked with petty and even squalid detail, more full of hopeless and insoluble difficulties."
  • (4) Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point-scoring and pettiness that drifts away in the next news cycle.
  • (5) We took all the feedback from users and put pencil to paper to create our consumer 3D printer built for speed and ease of use,” said Pettis.
  • (6) Facebook Twitter Pinterest China dismisses Trump call with Taiwan as ‘small trick’ However, Beijing’s public response has so far been measured, with the foreign ministry lodging a “solemn representation” with Washington and the foreign minister, Wang Yi, downplaying the development as “a petty move” by Taiwan.
  • (7) She won’t apologize for whatever makes the New York Times treat her with middle-school levels of petty scorn .
  • (8) The president should have directed the Justice Department to stop taking stupid points and petty appeals.” One reason the Justice Department pursued the habeas cases so hard was its client: the Pentagon.
  • (9) As the locus of many migrants' investments, the village of Los Pinos has experienced a modest growth in the number of full-time jobs paying somewhat above the minimum urban wage and in a variety of petty entrepreneurial activities depending heavily on the patronage of migrant households, themselves heavily subsidized by remittances.
  • (10) Indeed watching the prime minister singling out unemployed youngsters for uniquely punitive measures while pretending it is for their own good, cheered on by a gang of braying chums, it looks less like the behaviour of a national statesman and more like the petty vindictiveness of a schoolyard bully.
  • (11) Some are retired, others straddle the uncertain worlds of petty trading, agriculture and seasonal migrant labour.
  • (12) Not long ago, the mecca of American tourism was populated by sex workers, transvestites, drug addicts and petty criminals, rather than middle-class tourists.
  • (13) All the petty differences that divide us seem to melt away.
  • (14) Abdeslam relied on a large network of friends and relatives that already existed for drug dealing and petty crime to keep him in hiding,” Belgium’s federal prosecutor, Frederic Van Leeuw, told Belgian public broadcaster RTBF.
  • (15) Another said: "The problem with PMQs isn't so much that it's shouty but that the so-called pinnacle of political debate in this country is two men trading petty insults and making nasty jokes about the other while the rest of parliament boos and cheers behind them.
  • (16) They included a former monk, two young men with learning disabilities, a handful of petty criminals and a teacher at a private school in Paris who was "disappeared" by another republican group, the INLA.
  • (17) The study was conducted in the three contiguous counties of Johnson, Lafayette and Pettis in west central Missouri.
  • (18) Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo 14 Lunar Module Pilot, said that walking on the Moon gives you an instant global consciousness, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it, that international politics look so petty.
  • (19) It also found that some children were put into care without lawful basis, including for petty theft and for being rude.
  • (20) Parents are required to bring up children responsibly, while living in a form of servitude to licensed employers and petty line managers, often themselves at risk of returning to zero-hours.

Spiteful


Definition:

  • (a.) Filled with, or showing, spite; having a desire to vex, annoy, or injure; malignant; malicious; as, a spiteful person or act.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In spite of dense lymphocytic infiltration only 3% of the tumor infiltrating lymphocytes exhibit the activation marker CD 25.
  • (2) When labelled long-chain fatty acids or glycerol were infused into the lactating goat, there was extensive transfer of radioactivity into milk in spite of the absence of net uptake of substrate by the mammary gland.
  • (3) In spite of important differences in size, chemical composition, polymer density, and configuration, biological macromolecules indeed manifest some of the essential physical-chemical properties of gels.
  • (4) Mastitis in its complexity has managed to forestall all efforts of eradication in spite of years of research, antibiotics and practical control measures.
  • (5) In spite of antimalaria treatment, with cortisone and then with immuno-depressants, the outcome was fatal with a picture of acute reticulosis and neurological disorders.
  • (6) In spite of the presence of scar tissue following rhytidectomy, this procedure has been quite successful because of the rich blood supply in that area.
  • (7) By the GN of non-streptococcal etiology, AA's to the BLSE apparently of other specificity are obtained in some cases, in spite of the absence of antibodies to A-PS.
  • (8) In spite of the formation of the epoxide intermediate, no binding of [14C]d-limonene equivalents to mouse kidney proteins was observed.
  • (9) No cases of rheumatic fever and no acute nephritis appeared in spite of the vigorous immune response to both cellular and extracellular antigens of group A streptococci documented in 50% to 80% of patients, suggesting that strain variation may be a feature of rheumatogenicity as well as nephritogenicity of group A streptococcal pharyngitis.
  • (10) Clinical and inflammatory activity improved in both groups, but consistently more so in the auranofin group, in spite of the greater consumption of local steroids and NSAIDs in the placebo group.
  • (11) The reported case of fetal infection in spite of previous rubella vaccination of the mother does not discourage the use of rubella vaccine.
  • (12) Although operative mortality was significantly greater for women during most of this review period, mortality was similar during 1983 (2.6% for men versus 2.4% for women), in spite of a significantly higher incidence of unstable angina in the female group (54% for women versus 35% for men).
  • (13) The shapes of the curves for soleus and tibialis anterior are similar in spite of the different mechanical conditions of the two muscles.
  • (14) In spite of the limitations arising from the complex geometry of the right ventricule, echocardiography may be the most important non-invasive technique in the evaluation of the structural and functional repercussion of hypertension on the right ventricle.
  • (15) Thus, in spite of its excellent activity and unquestionable effectiveness, rifampicin should be used with caution in severe staphylococcal infections.
  • (16) My son was born healthy, strong and very handsome, in spite of his dangerous start.
  • (17) The great clinical value of the procedure is shown by the following findings:X-ray-negative lesions--including 2 cases of carcinoma--were found in 35 percent of the cases, radiologically demonstrated lesions could be defined more precisely in 18 percent, and the presence of colonic lesions could be ruled out in 11 percent in spite of equivocal X-ray findings.
  • (18) In spite of low fluoride content in their water supply, the findings revealed a generally low prevalence of caries experience (DMFT 1.26).
  • (19) In anesthetized cats, the enhancement of sympathetic activity and increase of the blood pressure in exclusion of afferents (section of vagosympathetic trunks and clamping of common carotid arteries) as well as the disappearance of the activity in enhanced afferentation, were shown to be transient and to disappear within a few minutes-scores of minutes in spite of the going on deafferentation or enhancement of afferentation.
  • (20) By modifying the spatial distribution of afferents to the network, we demonstrate that the same basic model functions properly in spite of afferents with nonuniform background firing rates.