What's the difference between skiff and stiff?

Skiff


Definition:

  • (n.) A small, light boat.
  • (v. t.) To navigate in a skiff.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Rupert Murdoch's company has acquired Skiff, established by magazine publisher Hearst last year to develop an online store and e-reader for its publications, which delivers "visually appealing layouts" of content to tablets, smartphones, e-readers such as Kindle and netbooks.
  • (2) The great-grandfather pushed a lever on the motor and the skiff slowly gained speed.
  • (3) "Once we'd done that we told the suspected pirates they could stay with us or get into a skiff and return to Somalia, and we would not shoot them.
  • (4) It is a non-violent version of the recklessness that makes teenagers in skiffs attempt to board immense tankers.
  • (5) Related Stories Magazine Consortium Will Launch With Five Partners: News Corp, Hearst, Time, Conde, Meredith Time Inc Close To Magazine JV With Rival Publishers Updated: The Hulu Complex: Mag Industry Looking At Its Own JV, Headed by Time Inc Hearst's Skiff Plans To Set Sail Next Year With E-Reader Platform, Devices—And Sprint Deal Yahoo Newspaper Consortium Has Generated Estimated $50m In Revenues
  • (6) The sun was straight up, it was May in Louisiana, and the heat was cooking the oil to fumes as the skiff stuck in place.
  • (7) Dolphin killers deliberately run over the pod with skiffs, they wrestle them, man-handled them into captive nets before even being slaughtered," Melissa Sehgal, a Sea Shepherd activist, told Reuters.
  • (8) They sat like oiled birds and watched the skiff, which had beached itself far across the open water, back on the island.
  • (9) John Miller, digital chief at News Corporation, said that "both Skiff and Journalism Online serve as key building blocks in our strategy to transform the publishing industry and ensure consumers will have continued access to the highest quality journalism."
  • (10) A rifle butt was jabbed into her back, there were two hard slaps to her head, and she was pulled into the water, where she saw a fisherman's skiff approaching.
  • (11) Soon the two of them were in a plank skiff being pushed east by Claude's five-horse Champion, a smoky old outboard he had to pull on ten times before it would even pop, the first tugs on the rope making only the noise of a startled hen.
  • (12) As the Phoenix’s reinforced steel bow ploughed through the swell towards the Libyan coast, the Eritreans were shepherded into groups of 50 to 100 and put into motor skiffs that carried them through the dark towards two fishing boats that, to their dismay, were both very old and very small.
  • (13) The slathered skiff seemed lost in a vast storage tank of crude oil, as thick as glue.
  • (14) Pearson correlations and standard errors of estimate expressed in %Y were 0.92 and 9.0% (Concept II vs. Gjessing), 0.93 and 7.9% (Gjessing vs. skiff), and 0.96 and 6.1% (Concept II vs skiff).
  • (15) This year will see a fascinating struggle for dominance between the Kindle, the Sony reader, Plastic Logic's Que, the Skiff Reader and LG's 19-inch bendy e-journal.
  • (16) A boat's engine throbbed in his ears and looking again at the water he saw his old uncle, Monsieur Abadie from all the way over in Tiger Island going out in his long skiff propelled by a one-cylinder inboard.
  • (17) But as the skiff slid along, they saw that it was not a little oil they were going though, but a broad deep pool of reddish crude that had blown against the shore and was turning the marsh grasses into tarred pretzels.
  • (18) Tenants can fish for perch, trout and grayling, and have a small, sandy beach, a skiff and two bikes to themselves.
  • (19) Suhali’s small wooden skiff, its paint peeling and decking loose, is tethered at the end of a rickety path of bamboo poles and old door frames.
  • (20) The pirates take to the seas off the Horn of Africa in small dhows, and even smaller skiffs, armed with old machine guns and pistols, wearing flip-flops, and gambling that they will be able to hijack a vessel before they run out of food or water, or drown.

Stiff


Definition:

  • (superl.) Not easily bent; not flexible or pliant; not limber or flaccid; rigid; firm; as, stiff wood, paper, joints.
  • (superl.) Not liquid or fluid; thick and tenacious; inspissated; neither soft nor hard; as, the paste is stiff.
  • (superl.) Firm; strong; violent; difficult to oppose; as, a stiff gale or breeze.
  • (superl.) Not easily subdued; unyielding; stubborn; obstinate; pertinacious; as, a stiff adversary.
  • (superl.) Not natural and easy; formal; constrained; affected; starched; as, stiff behavior; a stiff style.
  • (superl.) Harsh; disagreeable; severe; hard to bear.
  • (superl.) Bearing a press of canvas without careening much; as, a stiff vessel; -- opposed to crank.
  • (superl.) Very large, strong, or costly; powerful; as, a stiff charge; a stiff price.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) If you turn the bowl upside down, the whites should be stiff enough not to fall out.
  • (2) The stiffness of the fibre first rose abruptly in response to stretch and then started to decrease linearly while the stretch went on; after the completion of stretch the stiffness decreased towards a steady value which was equal to that during the isometric tetanus at the same sarcomere length, indicating that the enhancement of isometric force is associated with decreased stiffness.
  • (3) Current methodology for the in vitro determination of aortic and large artery stiffness is reviewed and involves three approaches: (1) the estimation of distensibility by pulse wave velocity measurement; (2) the estimation of distensibility from the fractional diameter change of a given arterial segment by imaging techniques (e.g., angiography, Doppler ultrasound) against pressure change; (3) the estimation of compliance by determining volume change against pressure change in the arterial system during diastolic runoff from the Windkessel model of the circulation.
  • (4) The maintenance of adequate blood circulation requires a sufficient ventricular contractility; in addition, to eject blood, the ventricles must first receive a sufficient volume, requiring a low diastolic stiffness.
  • (5) Stiffness was reduced in approximate proportion to the ramp stretch rate, and the reduction was confined largely to the elastic component.
  • (6) Proof stress, ultimate tensile strength, elongation, and plastic stiffness have been measured and results compared by use of analyses of variance.
  • (7) In other words, the stiffness of these areas was low and the recovery from deformation was fast.
  • (8) But the same court also just refused to hear an appeal of a Minnesota woman who's been ordered to pay more than $220,000 for downloading two-dozen songs – a testament to Congress' gift to Hollywood and its allies in the form of absurdly stiff penalties for minor infringement.
  • (9) The tension-length relation for the unstimulated (passive) cell is also linear between 1r and the elastic limit, but is displaced from the active tension-length curve and is of reduced stiffness.
  • (10) Bilaterals in summit seasons can be stiff exchanges, where digressions can carry risks: not enough said, too much said.
  • (11) We measured the stiffness of comparable configurations (1 or 2 bars) under axial compression, four-point-bending in two planes, and torsion.
  • (12) Tiny, tiny... rodents – some soft and grey, some brown with black stripes, in paintings, posters, wallcharts, thumb-tacked magazine clippings and poorly executed crayon drawings, hurling themselves fatally in their thousands over the cliff of their island home; or crudely taxidermied and mounted, eyes glazed and little paws frozen stiff – on every available surface.
  • (13) The bone stiffness also correlates strongly with the geometry (area) and slightly with bone mass; however, an unexpectedly low correlation was found between stiffness and density.
  • (14) Finally, fibrosis may paradoxically reduce passive stiffness if it leads to a thinning of the interventricular septum.
  • (15) A young male nephrotic patient, who was given small doses of clofibrate for hyperlipaemia, developed muscle pain, stiffness and very high serum levels of muscle enzymes.
  • (16) Impaired left ventricular stiffness may be an additional criterion for using corinfar in patients with coronary heart disease.
  • (17) The increase of elastic fibres following denervation and reinnervation represents an obviously meaningful reaction that may compensate for loss of tonic properties of muscle spindles without causing stiffness.
  • (18) Only the bone-patellar tendon-bone unit had maximum force and stiffness greater than that of the ACL.
  • (19) The initial stiffness is poorly described by material or catheter gauge.
  • (20) The stiffness tester and torque meter were found to yield nearly the same measurements of bending deformation for orthodontic wires as small as .007 inch diameter, provided the different bending apparatus are calibrated to each other.