What's the difference between prodigal and wanton?

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.

Wanton


Definition:

  • (v. t.) Untrained; undisciplined; unrestrained; hence, loose; free; luxuriant; roving; sportive.
  • (v. t.) Wandering from moral rectitude; perverse; dissolute.
  • (v. t.) Specifically: Deviating from the rules of chastity; lewd; lustful; lascivious; libidinous; lecherous.
  • (v. t.) Reckless; heedless; as, wanton mischief.
  • (n.) A roving, frolicsome thing; a trifler; -- used rarely as a term of endearment.
  • (n.) One brought up without restraint; a pampered pet.
  • (n.) A lewd person; a lascivious man or woman.
  • (v. i.) To rove and ramble without restraint, rule, or limit; to revel; to play loosely; to frolic.
  • (v. i.) To sport in lewdness; to play the wanton; to play lasciviously.
  • (v. t.) To cause to become wanton; also, to waste in wantonness.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) 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.
  • (2) He pointed out that the eighth amendment of the US constitution “prohibits the unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain through torture, barbarous methods, or methods resulting in a lingering death”.
  • (3) The real offense, for which no one has been charged, is the wanton disregard for human life that Manning exposed.
  • (4) We’re back to those flappers, with their jobs and their knee-length skirts and their dangerous opinions about politics, or the girls of the 1960s destroying the traditional family by wantonly taking the pill.
  • (5) Long said: "This is not an attack on an individual or on a party, but a wanton attack on the democratic process.
  • (6) In the 1930s the Spanish city of Guernica became a symbol of wanton murder and destruction.
  • (7) The wanton slaughter of two dozen civilians in Haditha, Iraq and the severe and even lethal torture of Afghan detainees generated, at worst, shockingly short jail time for the killers and, usually, little more than letters of reprimand.
  • (8) What distinguishes games from books, or films, is that the dodgy sexual politics and wanton violence of one is used as a stick to bash them all.
  • (9) "The president commiserates with all the families who lost loved ones in the heinous attacks and extends his heartfelt sympathies to all those who suffered injuries or lost their properties during the wanton assaults on Bauchi and Kaduna States," said a statement.
  • (10) But that doesn't mean that halting and reversing the wanton growth of shorthaul flights is an act of class war.
  • (11) Here in Bristol we could use the old railway lines that used to thread their way into the city, before Beeching and Marples ripped them up – another example of wanton government lack of foresight.
  • (12) To the contrary, they are the inevitable by-products of societies that recruit every institution in service of defending even the most wanton abuses by the state.
  • (13) Later at university, there were nice Protestant ladies and wanton atheists; taxpayer-funded Guinness and Spear of Destiny .
  • (14) Three hours of sexual and pharmacological excess, wanton debauchery, unfathomable avarice, gleeful misogyny, extreme narcotic brinksmanship, malfeasance and lawless behaviour is a lot to take, and some have complained of the film's relentlessness, which, if understood in formal terms, I think may be one of its main aims.
  • (15) Humankind must become accountable on a massive scale for the wanton destruction of our collective home.
  • (16) Young children were expected to carry out gruelling domestic chores and were wantonly punished, she says.
  • (17) An influential Communist party journal has compared online rumours to Cultural Revolution-style denunciations and warned of the need to curb "wanton defamation" of authority, as China intensifies its campaign to control social media.
  • (18) What we are seeing in London tonight, the wanton vandalism, smashing of windows, has nothing to do with peaceful protest."
  • (19) On the periphery of all the wanton lust and questionable puns stands Evie (Antonia Thomas), who’s pretty, sweet and has a camera; the holy trinity for chumps like Dylan.
  • (20) Following release of the Mosul video showing wanton destruction of antiquities, there has been a lot of email traffic between Libyans working in archaeology and Arab-world representatives on the major international heritage bodies,” said David Mattingly, a professor at the University of Leicester, who has spent years excavating Roman ruins in Libya.