What's the difference between prey and pry?

Prey


Definition:

  • (n.) Anything, as goods, etc., taken or got by violence; anything taken by force from an enemy in war; spoil; booty; plunder.
  • (n.) That which is or may be seized by animals or birds to be devoured; hence, a person given up as a victim.
  • (n.) The act of devouring other creatures; ravage.
  • (n.) To take booty; to gather spoil; to ravage; to take food by violence.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Unlike most birds of prey, which are territorial and fight each other over nesting and hunting grounds, the hen harrier nests close to other harriers.
  • (2) The concentration of prey and the ciliate mean cell volume, dry weight, and number per milliliter were determined at known growth rates.
  • (3) This unusual pattern of unbalanced growth may represent an adaptation by bdellovibrios to maximize their progeny yield from the determinate amount of substrate available within a given prey cell.
  • (4) We have four Money Shops in Medway: they know they can prey on the vulnerable, and most residents can't pay back on time.
  • (5) Plethodontid salamanders capture prey by projecting the tongue from the mouth.
  • (6) About 2 weeks after metamorphosis, midwife toads Alytes obstetricans judge the size of a prey object mainly in scales of visual angle.
  • (7) As the outer wall was dissolved, outgrowth began with the elongation of the germinant as it emerged from the prey ghost as an actively motile cell.
  • (8) In the present study the chemical composition of the venom was examined in order to determine the presence of constituents that may have physiologically important actions on the prey.
  • (9) The fate of those black boys and men rested in the hands of a racist system that preys on the fear and vulnerability of their parents.
  • (10) Paradoxical sleep is associated with a factor related to predatory danger, which suggests that large amounts of this sleep phase are disadvantageous in prey species.
  • (11) The latency increase is not likely to be due to motor fatigue, since it can be partially reversed by dishabituation with an alternate prey species.
  • (12) Two cases are considered: mutualism with the prey and mutualism with the first predator.
  • (13) At the same time, cetaceans are under threat from a variety of pressures including direct and indirect takes, pollution, and competition for habitat and prey.
  • (14) A wide range of suggested functions found in the literature include food acquisition, prey attack, aggression and attack behavior, facial expression in intraspecies communications, dispersion of pheromones, maintaining head position in swimming, and a wide range of environmental monitoring (e.g., current detection in water, wind direction on land).
  • (15) We suggest that the first step of the prey-catching sequence is to adjust the accommodative state of the lenses and thus lock the visual apparatus on to a stimulus.
  • (16) They prey on the population, kidnapping and extorting in cahoots with criminal gangs, according to multiple complaints filed to the human rights commission.
  • (17) For much of the film, Deckard refuses to identify himself with his prey; after all, that might make him no better than an organic machine.
  • (18) Phage typing was performed on 795 strains of Staphylococcus aureus isolated from poultry, a turkey, pigeons, and birds of prey in Japan and 4 countries in Europe, using the avian phage set of typing phages plus 6 others.
  • (19) Functional morphologists commonly study feeding behavior in vertebrates by recording electrical activity from head muscles during unrestrained prey capture.
  • (20) The strong reactivity of the two positive yellow baboon sera with SIVagm proteins raises questions about whether these animals may have been infected by green monkeys in their native habitat; baboons occasionally prey upon and eat green monkeys.

Pry


Definition:

  • (n.) A lever; also, leverage.
  • (v. t.) To raise or move, or attempt to raise or move, with a pry or lever; to prize.
  • (v. i.) To peep narrowly; to gaze; to inspect closely; to attempt to discover something by a scrutinizing curiosity; -- often implying reproach.
  • (n.) Curious inspection; impertinent peeping.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Affinity-purified human placental ribonuclease inhibitor (PRI) was digested by trypsin.
  • (2) I used to tease him with the suggestion he had chosen me as walking companion because I had no mathematics at all and so he was safe from prying questions, but in fact now and then he did used to tell me about what he was doing – and how clear it all seemed when he spoke!
  • (3) Human placental ribonuclease inhibitor (PRI), a 50-kDa tight-binding inhibitor of angiogenin and pancreatic ribonuclease, consists predominantly of 7 internal repeats, each 57 residues long.
  • (4) Deep in the taiga, the Mordovian colonies are well away from prying eyes.
  • (5) Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, suffered a severe reverse in regional elections last month as voters punished the party for failing to crack down on corruption, impunity and brutal drug gang violence.
  • (6) Open the phone just enough to reveal the metal bracket covering the home button cable, remove it with tweezers, and pry the connector up from its socket.
  • (7) Similarly, the development of ventriculomegaly may depend upon cerebral elastic properties besides the pri mary disturbance of CSF dynamics.
  • (8) Before Vicente Fox became president in 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) had won every election since 1929.
  • (9) Thirty DES-exposed women aged 17-30 years and 30 control women with a history of abnormal Pap smear findings were interviewed with the SADS-L and completed the SCL-90-R and the PRI-Q.
  • (10) However, the PrI sera of these horses showed reactivity at various intensities with one to seven of the component antigens.
  • (11) The pantographic reproducibility index (PRI) has been developed to quantitate incoordinated mandibular movements; one of the signs and symptoms of TMJ dysfunction.
  • (12) Data from this study suggest that the MGPQ-PRI might be useful for the assessment of fibromyalgic pain in a clinical setting and during follow-up of the disease.
  • (13) The arrangement of overlapping genes at the pri locus of IncP alpha plasmids also appears to be present in the IncP beta group.
  • (14) So pry between the boards of the housing recovery and the termites start crawling out.
  • (15) The delay in the postcastration increase in plasma level of LH in the OVX hens was not associated with anorexia of incubating hens, since plasma levels of LH were not affected by force-feeding unless plasma levels of PRI were suppressed by nest deprivation.
  • (16) Some people are also afraid that prying eyes might spot Prep, which can also be used for HIV treatment, in a person’s medicine cabinet and assume that they are positive.
  • (17) Alec says 2,000 legislators and business lobbyists are expected to attend, participating in numerous meetings where new model bills will be privately crafted – away from the prying eyes of the media .
  • (18) Compared with the control group, statistically significant increases of SCE and HFC, as well as decreased cell kinetics (PRI) were observed for both occupationally and environmentally exposed groups.
  • (19) Banks have far more to fear from the prying of other financial companies than they do from any data provider.
  • (20) The stability of the angiogenin-PRI complex was assessed by cation-exchange HPLC quantitation of free angiogenin.