What's the difference between sell and spell?

Sell


Definition:

  • (n.) Self.
  • (n.) A sill.
  • (n.) A cell; a house.
  • (n.) A saddle for a horse.
  • (n.) A throne or lofty seat.
  • (v. t.) To transfer to another for an equivalent; to give up for a valuable consideration; to dispose of in return for something, especially for money.
  • (v. t.) To make a matter of bargain and sale of; to accept a price or reward for, as for a breach of duty, trust, or the like; to betray.
  • (v. t.) To impose upon; to trick; to deceive; to make a fool of; to cheat.
  • (v. i.) To practice selling commodities.
  • (v. i.) To be sold; as, corn sells at a good price.
  • (n.) An imposition; a cheat; a hoax.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Several selling VCs were also Google investors; one sat on Google's board.
  • (2) No one has jobs,” said Annie, 45, who runs a street stall selling fried chicken and rice in the Matongi neighbourhood.
  • (3) A failure to reach a solution would potentially leave 200,000 homes without affordable cover, leaving owners unable to sell their properties and potentially exposing them to financial hardship.
  • (4) If Clegg's concerns do broadly accord with Cameron's, how will the PM sell such a big U-turn to his increasingly anti-Clegg backbenchers?
  • (5) After two placings of shares with institutional investors which began two years ago, the government has been selling shares by “dribbling” them into the market.
  • (6) Meanwhile, Brighton rock duo Royal Blood top this week's album chart with their self-titled album, scoring the UK's fastest selling British rock debut in three years.
  • (7) The group set aside £3.2bn to cover PPI mis-selling in 2011.
  • (8) Even so, the release of the first-half figures could help clear the way for the chancellor, George Osborne, to start selling off the taxpayer’s 79% stake in the bank, a legacy of the institution’s 2008 bailout.
  • (9) It’s not like there’s a simple answer.” Vassilopoulos said: “The media is all about entertainment.” “I don’t think they sell too many papers or get too many advertisements because of their coverage of income inequality,” said Calvert.
  • (10) Giving voice to that sentiment the mass-selling daily newspaper Ta Nea dedicated its front-page editorial to what it hoped would soon be the group's demise, describing Alexopoulos' desertion as a "positive development".
  • (11) And we will sell those assets that can be managed better by the private sector.
  • (12) At the same time, however, he has backed the quality of the technology that the company is developing and resisted pressure to sell off underperforming businesses.
  • (13) In Wednesday’s budget speech , George Osborne acknowledged there had been a big rise in overseas suppliers storing goods in Britain and selling them online without paying VAT.
  • (14) Apple could quite possibly afford to promise to pay out 80% of its streaming iTunes income, especially if such a service helped it sell more iPhones and iPads, where the margins are bigger.
  • (15) It acts as a one-stop shop bringing together credit unions and other organisations, such as Five Lamps , a charity providing loans, and white-goods providers willing to sell products with low-interest repayments.
  • (16) For an industry built on selling ersatz rebellion to teenagers, finding the moral high ground was always going to be tricky.
  • (17) The newspaper is the brainchild of Jaime Villalobos, who saw homeless people selling The Big Issue while he was studying natural resource management in Newcastle.
  • (18) She knew that Ford needed parts for the best-selling truck in America, and she knew how to make them.
  • (19) Japan needs to sell whale meat at a competitive price, similar to that of pork or chicken, and to do that it needs to increase its annual catch."
  • (20) Rawlins bought a stake in Stoke City in 2000, where he'd been a season ticket-holder from the age of five, after selling off his IT consultancy company and joined the board.

Spell


Definition:

  • (n.) A spelk, or splinter.
  • (v. t.) To supply the place of for a time; to take the turn of, at work; to relieve; as, to spell the helmsman.
  • (n.) The relief of one person by another in any piece of work or watching; also, a turn at work which is carried on by one person or gang relieving another; as, a spell at the pumps; a spell at the masthead.
  • (n.) The time during which one person or gang works until relieved; hence, any relatively short period of time, whether a few hours, days, or weeks.
  • (n.) One of two or more persons or gangs who work by spells.
  • (n.) A gratuitous helping forward of another's work; as, a logging spell.
  • (n.) A story; a tale.
  • (n.) A stanza, verse, or phrase supposed to be endowed with magical power; an incantation; hence, any charm.
  • (v. t.) To tell; to relate; to teach.
  • (v. t.) To put under the influence of a spell; to affect by a spell; to bewitch; to fascinate; to charm.
  • (v. t.) To constitute; to measure.
  • (v. t.) To tell or name in their proper order letters of, as a word; to write or print in order the letters of, esp. the proper letters; to form, as words, by correct orthography.
  • (v. t.) To discover by characters or marks; to read with difficulty; -- usually with out; as, to spell out the sense of an author; to spell out a verse in the Bible.
  • (v. i.) To form words with letters, esp. with the proper letters, either orally or in writing.
  • (v. i.) To study by noting characters; to gain knowledge or learn the meaning of anything, by study.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) We outline a protocol for presenting the diagnosis of pseudoseizure with the goal of conveying to the patient the importance of knowing the nonepileptic nature of the spells and the need for psychiatric follow-up.
  • (2) The government did not spell out the need for private holders of bank debt to take any losses – known as haircuts – under its plans but many analysts believe that this position is untenable.
  • (3) The tasks which appeared to present the most difficulties for the patients were written spelling, pragmatic processing tasks like sentence disambiguation and proverb interpretation.
  • (4) John Carver witnessed signs of much-needed improvement from the visitors in a purposeful spell either side of the interval but it was not enough to prevent a fifth successive Premier League defeat.
  • (5) The lesson, spelled out by Oak Creek's mayor, Steve Saffidi, was that it shouldn't have taken a tragedy for Sikhs, or anyone else, to find acceptance.
  • (6) Likud warned: “Peres will divide Jerusalem.” Arab states feared that his dream of a borderless Middle East spelled Israeli economic colonialism by stealth.
  • (7) This could spell disaster for small farmers, says Million Belay, co-ordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa.
  • (8) In addition to expected differences in spelling and reading, probands obtained significantly (P less than or equal to .01) lower scores than controls on tests of other cognitive abilities.
  • (9) Despite fulfilling a boyhood wish to play for Milan when he returned to Italy, the striker admitted he erred in taking his career back to Serie A, having had a controversial spell at Internazionale before City recruited him for £17.5m in August 2010.
  • (10) Yesterday, John McDonnell spelled out the new Labour leadership’s public investment-driven economic alternative to austerity.
  • (11) Recognition memory was assessed by asking subjects to indicate which words from a longer list were presented during the spelling test.
  • (12) It was a spell in which the Dutch were in the ascendancy.
  • (13) When I wrote this week's public manager column pointing out that there are still too few women in senior public sector leadership roles, it didn't occur to me that I would have to spell out the reasons why it might be a good idea to have a few more women in top positions.
  • (14) Sigurdsson joined Reading as a youngster in 2005, and had loan spells at Crewe and Shrewsbury before breaking into the first team.
  • (15) Slow speech development occurred frequently in developmental and acquired spelling dysgraphic children.
  • (16) True, that comment was made early in Guardiola’s spell as Bayern manager and perhaps it was just a way of endearing himself to his new captain, but there is no doubt the former Barcelona manager adores Lahm.
  • (17) Since ALS occurs mostly in older age groups, this brings up the possibility that aging changes in the brain could play a causative role in the origin of such spells.
  • (18) A long spell of ultra-low interest rates has not driven a rise in inequality in the UK, the deputy governor of the Bank of England has said, rebuffing criticism that central bank policy had hurt some households.
  • (19) 3.05pm BST The Russian foreign ministry has again spelled out Sergei Lavrov's objections to threatening Syria with force if it doesn't comply with the chemical weapons agreement.
  • (20) However, when spelling ability was investigated, a heritability of 0.53 was obtained, increasing to 0.75 when intelligence was controlled.