What's the difference between seedy and sordid?

Seedy


Definition:

  • (superl.) Abounding with seeds; bearing seeds; having run to seeds.
  • (superl.) Having a peculiar flavor supposed to be derived from the weeds growing among the vines; -- said of certain kinds of French brandy.
  • (superl.) Old and worn out; exhausted; spiritless; also, poor and miserable looking; shabbily clothed; shabby looking; as, he looked seedy coat.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Calculations were based on the contamination of 2310 specimens of citrus fruits, pitted and seedy fruits and vegetables collected in the 1985-86 and 1989 campaigns.
  • (2) Danny Green plays punchy ex-boxer "One-Round", Peter Sellers's Harry is the archetypal cockney spiv, Cecil Parker's seedy ex-officer Major Courtney a recurrent postwar figure.
  • (3) "It is artistic and not dark or seedy," the broadcaster said, while admitting that "in hindsight" the title may have caused problems.
  • (4) Sugiura was believed to have been negotiating a settlement to a territorial dispute in Tokyo's seedy Roppongi district with the Kokusui-kai, a smaller Tokyo-based gang that joined the Yamaguchi-gumi in 2005, just as the latter began extending its influence in the capital and other parts of eastern Japan .
  • (5) Last year, the winner was Glasgow-born Susan Philipsz , for a sound installation she created in the seedy, dank shadow of a bridge over the Clyde.
  • (6) Evidently, Richards saw the impersonation as an affectionate tribute, and in this third picture in the franchise he has a brief role as Jack Sparrow's wonderfully seedy father, Captain Jack Teague.
  • (7) He also realised that if Las Vegas's seedy image was changed, it could bring in a new clientele.
  • (8) The character grew out of a sketch called "Seedy Boss" that Gervais's long-time writing partner, Stephen Merchant, shot for his BBC training course.
  • (9) But following a murder and two high-profile arson attacks in the past month, the Kent town has been the subject of a series of lurid headlines that suggest it may take more than a cultural revolution for Margate to escape its seedy past.
  • (10) Both brothers said they wanted to put the seedy deals of the Blair-Brown era behind them.
  • (11) There are networks of mateship that become pretty seedy, they are about influence peddling and become more dangerous, he says.
  • (12) The Gare du Midi neighbourhood is seen by many as a seedy area where you don’t want to hang around if you can help it (and with a Eurostar ticket you can easily hop on a train to the smartly renovated Central Station).
  • (13) "This seedy bid would shame a banana republic," Watson said, while Labour frontbencher Ivan Lewis asked why Hunt had had "so little to say on the phone hacking scandal".
  • (14) 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.
  • (15) Ten minutes walk from Frankfurt's main railway station, through a warren of sex shops and seedy gambling dens, two dozen of the most powerful unelected people on the continent gather once a fortnight to try to save Europe from itself.
  • (16) I had always thought of him as seedy – a walking STD in skinny jeans – but he looks surprisingly wholesome: lovely olive skin, Malteser-brown eyes, well-washed, tactile (more knee patting than you’d get off Terry Wogan in his prime).
  • (17) Instead of the seedy anti-democratic gang that plotted against a Labour prime minister, they can claim to be the first line of defence against indiscriminate attacks on the streets of Britain.
  • (18) The more we talk, and the more you listen to his old material, the more he seems less like the righteous Bill Hicks type "lazy" journalists like to compare him to, and more a Charles Bukowski -esque character: a drunken deadbeat throwing out tales from America's seedy underbelly without caring too much what the "message" is.
  • (19) Subjects were then examined and the four quadrants of each breast were rated on a scale of 0 to 3 (0 = normal, fatty tissue, 1 = little seedy bumps or fine nodularity, 2 = discrete nodules or ropy tissue, 3 = confluent areas, hard or soft masses).
  • (20) It has not entirely shaken off its earliest, seedy connotations – but then that’s part of its charm.

Sordid


Definition:

  • (a.) Filthy; foul; dirty.
  • (a.) Vile; base; gross; mean; as, vulgar, sordid mortals.
  • (a.) Meanly avaricious; covetous; niggardly.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Haki's naivety about English detective fiction is more than matched by Latimer's ingenuous excitement as Haki describes to him Dimitrios's sordid career, and he decides it would be fun to write the gangster's biography.
  • (2) It might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning."
  • (3) Scarcely a day goes by without another apology for past failures, another gimmicky new policy, another sordid attempt to grab headlines.
  • (4) A former police officer is less complimentary: "The clientele in these places are by definition pretty sordid, highly manipulative and sleazy," he says.
  • (5) As Margarito and Inez argue over what really happened that day in Culiacan, it seems that they are no longer describing yet another sordid killing in the endless war on drugs.
  • (6) How could any organisation survive the sordid revelations that emerged at the Leveson inquiry, costing the Murdoch empire millions in compensation and legal fees, along with the closure of a flagship title?
  • (7) He recalled the stench and listening to the screams of others echoing through their sordid dungeon.
  • (8) The "titillating details" of the "sordid affairs" of the Anna Nicole saga "enticed" Bahamians and changed the face of the island's politics, two confidential memos sent by the embassy in Nassau reveal.
  • (9) "Of all the sites, it was the most depressing and slightly sordid," she says, "while other places often had an air of melancholy or seemed slightly otherworldly at dawn.
  • (10) Wilde takes no prisoners from the very outset: “The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others.” It’s a very Wildean, quasi-epigrammatic reversal – the reader expects something worthy, collectivist and altruistic, instead he gets something that’s irreverent, individualistic and apparently selfish.
  • (11) To begin with, it was a different kind of image problem: in Georgian society gin was considered rackety and sordid, not fusty and old-fashioned as it was in the swinging 60s.
  • (12) Often only one – and sometimes no – carriage door would open when they pulled into a station, and in summer they were “cooled” only by the methodical sweep of a begrimed metal fan that just pushed the sordid air about.
  • (13) The principle is a simple one: it involves national resources going into education, health and housing, instead of being siphoned off into the offshore accounts of the super-rich or squandered on sordid overseas conflicts, instigated by the inadequate for the profit of their paymasters.
  • (14) In her 1963 novel A Summer Birdcage , Margaret Drabble’s narrator Sarah describes a “loathsome flat” in the King’s Road, Chelsea, and an “unspeakably sordid” place in Highgate.
  • (15) Again, my first instinct is that they must have been rubbernecking, the sordid allegations having made HRH a rather grim sort of draw, or at the very least not as ferociously dull and pointless as the rest of the apres-ski programme .
  • (16) One letter said: "Will some evil person leak the entire proceedings and all the sordid details so that the irresponsible global media … can really get their teeth into them?"
  • (17) Two years ago, in a joint interview with Ruth Rendell, the writers were asked by a Daily Telegraph reporter, "how two respectable, middle-class ladies" could be involved in the "sordid world of crime fiction?"
  • (18) At the same time, the cable adds, the "titillating details of Anna Nicole's sordid affairs have enticed the Bahamian public to give renewed focus to government indiscretions".
  • (19) This is a potentially serious point, seeing as to require any priest to solemnise what he believes to be sordid would be to mandate hypocrisy and thereby demean the prospective services.
  • (20) But the release of three separate reports on Friday; from the Metropolitan police and the NSPCC, the Crown Prosecution Service and from Surrey police, has shed harsh light on what Commander Peter Spindler of Scotland Yard labelled a sordid tale of a larger than figure who had "groomed the nation".