What's the difference between prodigal and prodigious?

Prodigal


Definition:

  • (a.) Given to extravagant expenditure; expending money or other things without necessity; recklessly or viciously profuse; lavish; wasteful; not frugal or economical; as, a prodigal man; the prodigal son; prodigal giving; prodigal expenses.
  • (n.) One who expends money extravagantly, viciously, or without necessity; one that is profuse or lavish in any expenditure; a waster; a spendthrift.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) So intense was the pre‑match excitement in Dortmund over the return of the prodigal Jürg – much of it media-led – that walking around this flat, functional city on the afternoon of the game you half expected to stumble across Klopp shrines, New Orleans-style Klopp jazz funerals, to look up and find his great beaming visage looming over the city like some vast alien saucer.
  • (2) Surely not just to accommodate Fabregas who is looking ever more an Arsenal reject than a prodigal son."
  • (3) Australia The role of Assange, the country's prodigal son, has generated the most coverage and debate.
  • (4) The album – 14 stoned insights into the mind of a prodigal 19-year-old submerged in bleak inner-city paranoia – may feel disobediently unbrilliant at times.
  • (5) The French poet Charles Baudelaire, prodigal son of the industrial revolution, is less careful with his time.
  • (6) Throughout the last stretch of the journey, in a minibus driving along winding roads through the misty Welsh landscape, I am in full prodigal-son mode, returning to the land of my fathers, or at least my mother's fathers.
  • (7) The results obtained indicated that only the mutant N189-10A, which have a defect in the pathway positioned next to the nucleotide precursor, guanosine triphosphate (GTP), produces prodigeous amounts of diacetyl and acetoin among the mutants and the wild strain used.
  • (8) Managerless Sunderland did an awful lot right but even their own, impressive, prodigal son, Lee Cattermole – starting his first Premier League match since February – could not prevent them coming undone on the break and they remain stuck firmly to the bottom of the table.
  • (9) He’d been Howard’s prodigal son, sometimes kissed and sometimes banished.
  • (10) Society wants a repentant sinner, but Arena's is a story about theatre and ideas, not some prodigal redemption.
  • (11) As any casual browser in the biography section of a bookshop will quickly realise, it is not enough these days for the writers of biographies to stand at one remove from their subjects; readers and publishers demand more of a connection – a lover, a prodigal son, an ex-wife.
  • (12) It's good for the league to snag a prodigal son, but Landon Donovan has been around for years.
  • (13) It will abolish guardianship by reason of mental disease, mental deficiency, prodigality, habitual drunkenness and drug addiction as well as guardianship of persons of full age and curatorship of infirm adults.
  • (14) Desperate to regain corporate members and shore up its ailing finances, Alec put together a list of companies it wished to woo back under the title “ the Prodigal Son Project ”.
  • (15) We should do for Greece what the Allies did for Germany, and say that she should not spend more than 3% of her export revenues on debt servicing, and that should be the deciding factor.” A survey of economists by Bloomberg last week found that more than half expect Greece to receive some debt relief after the election – notwithstanding the purported “moral hazard” of bailing out prodigal debtors.
  • (16) True, the Tottenham manager's "prodigal son" scored twice, Adebayor thereby boosting his goal tally to nine in 12 games, but Paulinho, Mousa Dembélé and Hugo Lloris all enjoyed splendid evenings too.
  • (17) This recurrent theme in her fictional writing is linked to events in her own family life, in particular her own assumption of a scapegoat-prodigal child role during the "African period" of her life.
  • (18) If it follows the prodigal habits of its parents, it would waste more energy in its lifetime than 20 Kenyans would carefully consume.
  • (19) He wants Kiev to return on its knees, like a prodigal son, to the fatherly embrace of the empire.
  • (20) In this dysfunctional family comedy, directed by Niegel Smith, a prodigal son returns home to find that his sister is now a brother and his formerly put-upon mother (the marvelously screwball Kristine Nielsen) is newly liberated and feeling less than wifely.

Prodigious


Definition:

  • (a.) Of the nature of a prodigy; marvelous; wonderful; portentous.
  • (a.) Extraordinary in bulk, extent, quantity, or degree; very great; vast; huge; immense; as, a prodigious mountain; a prodigious creature; a prodigious blunder.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Radio remained hostile to electronic dance music unless it had a conventional pop song structure and vocals (as with the Prodigy's punk-rave or Madonna's coopting of trance on Ray of Light ).
  • (2) Although a weak correlation between urinary calcium excretion and stone number was observed, the cause for prodigious stone formation could not be explained.
  • (3) He has classical roots in common with Michael Clark, the Royal Ballet prodigy turned punk choreographer.
  • (4) Jack Charlton, maintaining the remarkable standard of his World Cup performances, had to intervene with a prodigious sweeping tackle on the ground to get them out of trouble.
  • (5) The periplasmic C proteins (C1 and C2 isoelectric forms) were produced in prodigious quantities from the cloned strains.
  • (6) Rivals and analysts underestimated his single-minded determination and prodigious work ethic, and overlooked an unofficial campaign that began years before his name went on the ballot papers for the second time.
  • (7) He kept up a prodigious work rate even when ill. At the height of his activity he was simultaneously writing about politics, wine and television as well as radio programmes, a weekly diary and a stream of books.
  • (8) Winner of the National Book Award in 1993, Vidal's literary output was prodigious, with more than 20 novels, including the transsexual satire Myra Breckinridge, the black comedy Duluth, and a series of historical fiction charting the history of the United States.
  • (9) It is suggested that in its myriad roles, ranging from cooking to the prodigious function of sacrifice in human history and psychology, the decisive position of the role of fire in the emergence and development of homo sapiens may conceivably include a significant "overdetermining" position among the multiple elements conditioning the appearance of human speech and language.
  • (10) They were quick to the ball, strong in the tackle and their workload was prodigious.
  • (11) The two-year-old artificial intelligence startup was founded by former child chess prodigy and neuroscientist Demis Hassabis alongside Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman.
  • (12) In case his writers are wondering what word to use instead, he offers a "handy list of synonyms" that includes "huge", "prodigious", "elephantine" and the very adult Swiftian term "Brobdingnagian".
  • (13) Its prodigious collection of print, audiovisual, and electronic information; its imaginative research projects; its excellent outreach program; and its innovative services and products are indispensable to all practicing health professionals, scientists, and medical educators, as well as to journalists, government officials, and others.
  • (14) Season two crafted complex characters racked with existential ambivalence – heroines marked for the abyss, fragile, flammable outcasts and desolate prodigies, all of whose private pain was as palpable as the crimson bloodbath head witch Evelyn Poole soaks in.
  • (15) The oral cavity is populated by a prodigious microbial flora that exhibits a unique successional colonization of enamel and subgingival root surfaces.
  • (16) The only greenery more impressive than the massive trees are the prodigious mosses and lichens hanging from every branch.
  • (17) Bilic’s side were the more threatening team as the first half wore on and their prodigious work-rate, typified by Mark Noble chasing down a lost cause and winning a corner from James Milner, was impressive.
  • (18) But Google's acquisition of DeepMind Technologies earlier this year, founded by a former child chess prodigy only two years ago, will be followed by more big-money transactions involving home-grown tech companies.
  • (19) But the Brits announcement has not come in isolation; it follows the collapse in the last two years of three dance music magazines (Muzik, Ministry and Jockey Slut), the news that London superclub Ministry of Sound's revenues have fallen by more than a third since 2001, and, most recently, the commercial failure of the latest albums from Britain's two biggest dance acts, Fatboy Slim and the Prodigy.
  • (20) Freud is notable not only for his prodigious output - at any one time he will be at work on five or six paintings and, perhaps, an etching - but for the intense way in which he scrutinises his subjects (he is adamant that they 'affect the air around them', so his sitters must be present even when only the background is being painted).