What's the difference between prodigal and wastrel?

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.

Wastrel


Definition:

  • (n.) Any waste thing or substance
  • (n.) Waste land or common land.
  • (n.) A profligate.
  • (n.) A neglected child; a street Arab.
  • (n.) Anything cast away as bad or useless, as imperfect bricks, china, etc.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) On the pitch Everton are potent but porous, entertaining but error-prone, extravagant wastrels who are undermining the excellent work of their top scorer.
  • (2) Louche wastrel Seann Walsh has charisma to burn and his highly crafted material belies his laddish manner.
  • (3) Sarah and her wastrel husband, Harry, are thinly disguised portraits of Wesker's own parents, Leah and Joseph, who were the children of immigrants from eastern Europe and who worked as tailoring machinists.

Words possibly related to "wastrel"