What's the difference between preen and prowl?

Preen


Definition:

  • (n.) A forked tool used by clothiers in dressing cloth.
  • (n.) To dress with, or as with, a preen; to trim or dress with the beak, as the feathers; -- said of birds.
  • (n.) To trim up, as trees.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "Anne Hathaway at least tried to sing and dance and preen along to the goings on, but Franco seemed distant, uninterested and content to keep his Cheshire-cat-meets-smug smile on display throughout."
  • (2) His running here was unstinting and he doubled his tally with a clinical finish after a first touch too smart for Pogatetz, preening perhaps after giving Boro a sniff of reprieve.
  • (3) Having started out preening (he tells a former colleague that he lives "the life of Riley"), he ends up howling alone on a small rock, the decision to adorn himself with a beautiful young wife having stolen his stature, robbed him of his dignity.
  • (4) What's more, his genial stiffness and shy self-awareness give him a kind of awkward dignity compared to the preening smugness of Cruz.
  • (5) He remembers Obama's incoming cabinet posing for portraits in the White House during the height of the crisis: “what a weird and preening thing for us to do while the world is burning”.
  • (6) 'Jonathan Saunders, Preen, Berardi, Kane and JW Anderson are on fire' Those are the names you will be raving about now.
  • (7) Romney's event is being organised by Scott Preen, a London company that specialises in high-profile political fundraising parties.
  • (8) If the Packham show emphasised a disconnect between the fashion industry's quest for trends and pure red carpet dressing, then the Preen show later in the day underlined how a move to the US can give a British label a healthy dollop of slickness.
  • (9) At best, these corporate-dominated panels are mostly useless: preening sessions in which chief executives exercise messiah complexes.
  • (10) Total lipid was extracted from chicken (Gallus domesticus) epidermis, leg scale, claws, feathers and preen glands and analyzed by quantitative thin-layer chromatography.
  • (11) Comparatively higher activity was observed in the extent of ambulation and rearing at 5 weeks old, rearing and preening at 7 weeks old, and preening and defecation at 11 weeks old in the Sprague-Dawley rats compared with the Wistar rats.
  • (12) In his preening, know-it-all professional arrogance, Cruise thinks he's bulletproof, but the mouse roars, and the hitman pays (incidentally, when casting a soullessly efficient, emotionally unavailable professional, could there be a more perfect candidate than Cruise?).
  • (13) The animals showed depressed response of preening on day 2 and 6.
  • (14) In 1909, the American illustrator Rose O’Neill drew a comic strip about “kewpies” (taken from cupid) – preening babylike creatures with tiny wings and huge heads, which were handed out as carnival prizes and capered around Jell-O ads (to this day, Kewpie Mayonnaise, introduced in 1925, is the top-selling brand in Japan).
  • (15) Trichobilharzia ocellata cercariae attach readily to the foot skin of their duck host, but poorly to preen-gland contents.
  • (16) Jane, a journalist in her 40s, thinks so: "I won't stay long in the weights room," she says: "The men are preening themselves.
  • (17) In the short-term, times spent feeding, drinking and preening decreased.
  • (18) Daily decrease was observed in ambulation, rearing and preening responses, with maximum decrement on the seventh day of Dimecron intoxication.
  • (19) From day 9, the preening response exhibited a continuous increasing pattern until the last day of the experiment.
  • (20) Power is meaningless unless it’s displayed, enacted: hence Vladimir Putin’s bare-chested preening or his sessions of bone-crushing judo .

Prowl


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To rove over, through, or about in a stealthy manner; esp., to search in, as for prey or booty.
  • (v. t.) To collect by plunder; as, to prowl money.
  • (v. i.) To rove or wander stealthily, esp. for prey, as a wild beast; hence, to prey; to plunder.
  • (n.) The act of prowling.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) He was a prowling, volcanic presence on the touchline.
  • (2) It did not seem April was specifically targeted, the judge said, telling Bridger he was seemingly "on the prowl for a young girl".
  • (3) It’s one thing to let the lion prowl around your stock pen, it’s another to open the gate and let him in,” he said.
  • (4) The multimillionaire darling of the grassroots party faithful had stormed out of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet only a year earlier, and was now prowling the backbenches, preparing to wield the knife that would finish her off.
  • (5) On the other side of the door gunmen were by now prowling the corridor, looking for British and American guests to kill.
  • (6) In response to Alex Salmond's manouevres, he has recently been out on the prowl himself, thinking aloud about what Scottish independence might mean for his country, and suggesting radical changes to the way that Britain's institutions work.
  • (7) Quite how the pandas will feel after 10 years of prowling this same patch is open to suggestion.
  • (8) I’ve been doing this since I was 22.” A couple of local union organizers prowled the sidewalks, asking applicants to sign union cards, but they walked right past Kevin Moynihan, who cut an imposing figure clad all in black.
  • (9) But who would wish to buy in an age when Uber’s smartphone app prowls the land?
  • (10) When they spotted a gang prowling in a street out of bounds to Muslims, they called their Christian vigilante counterparts.
  • (11) Gates would prowl the car park to see who came in on the weekend.
  • (12) The story begins in 1960 when the 43-year-old Anthony Burgess returned from Singapore to find the England he'd left in the late Forties transformed into an ugly divided country where the last seedy Teds prowled the streets of London and race riots had erupted in our big cities.
  • (13) A few years ago, on a field trip, he spotted a common leopard prowling well into snow leopard heights.
  • (14) News that he is on the prowl can cause his prey's management to be driven to distraction to the point where the company is in danger of imploding.
  • (15) When the rest of the industry was building computers as grey, rectangular metal boxes, for example, he was prowling department stores and streets looking for design metaphors.
  • (16) Banking is changing: statements are paperless, payments are mobile, branches are sparser, more automated, populated by beaming cashiers prowling around with iPads.
  • (17) With Boris Johnson on the prowl, they have to gently trash the mayor of London.
  • (18) Alistair Campbell prowled around snapping at the snappers' heels.
  • (19) Yet as Bush throws everything he has this week at boosting his moribund poll numbers – from announcing dozens of party endorsements, to buying airtime for political ads and prowling television studios like never before – some palpable question marks are beginning to hang over campaign stops like this.
  • (20) Microsoft's Kinectimals has prowled onto iOS and Android.

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