What's the difference between smother and suffocate?

Smother


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To destroy the life of by suffocation; to deprive of the air necessary for life; to cover up closely so as to prevent breathing; to suffocate; as, to smother a child.
  • (v. t.) To affect as by suffocation; to stife; to deprive of air by a thick covering, as of ashes, of smoke, or the like; as, to smother a fire.
  • (v. t.) Hence, to repress the action of; to cover from public view; to suppress; to conceal; as, to smother one's displeasure.
  • (v. i.) To be suffocated or stifled.
  • (v. i.) To burn slowly, without sufficient air; to smolder.
  • (v. t.) Stifling smoke; thick dust.
  • (v. t.) A state of suppression.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) As attorneys who practice asylum law, we believe deeply in our nation’s obligation to provide real protection to refugees, but the Obama administration’s willful disregard of existing asylum laws and procedures – and its smothering of due process with detention and rapid deportation – is truly appalling.
  • (2) Brad Guzan produced a superb save to deny Ayew, rushing off his line to smother a left-foot shot from six yards out, and 33 seconds later the Swansea forward’s brother had the ball in the net at the other end.
  • (3) Conveniently, it is not far from the Via Algarviana , allowing us to leave the car and hike the stretch to Alte (16km), passing shuttered houses smothered in creepers in old, abandoned villages.
  • (4) Buffon's understudy Marchetti gets down brilliantly to smother the cross.
  • (5) Instead, the least attractive aspects of London 2012, the ZiL lanes and the Visa-only policy and McDonald's and Coca-Cola as purveyors of sustenance to a sporting nation, were smothered not only by the competition but by the ocean of good humour fostered by the joviality of the volunteers, the inspirational architecture and the attention given to the natural landscape (with apologies to those who had to move to make room for it all).
  • (6) Later, when it was realised that pieces of aluminium and magnesium among this waste could catch fire and cause widespread contamination, inert argon gas had to be pumped in to smother potential blazes.
  • (7) Updated at 5.30pm BST 5.13pm BST Game and second set to Roger Federer Rewind the clocks and smother the future , the venerable Roger Federer isn't Wimbledon history yet.
  • (8) Our descent into Delhi was delayed because of fog, we were told, but the nicotine-coloured blanket smothering this dynamic Indian city was a malignant smog.
  • (9) Bayern are braced for their visitors to employ similar tactics to those that deflated Barcelona in their semi-final, a smothering defence and bite on the break game-plan that has drawn local criticism in print from Günter Netzer and Matthias Sammer.
  • (10) The wall of ice that rises behind Sermilik fjord stretches for 1,500 miles (2,400km) from north to south and smothers 80% of this country.
  • (11) The decision by the MP for Mid Bedfordshire to become the first serving MP to take part in the show, which features famous faces performing in stunts that in the past have included being smothered in insects and eating a kangaroo's penis, could keep her from parliamentary and constituency business for a month.
  • (12) Hazard is sent off for kicking the ball under a ballboy attempting to smother the ball rather than return it.
  • (13) The forward bustled in, stealing the ball and holding off the centre-half as he attempted to wrest it back, before ripping a glorious shot from a horribly tight angle into the far top corner as Ben Foster edged out to smother.
  • (14) He's never quite in control, though, and his attempted lift into the net is smothered by the outrushing Ospina.
  • (15) Before he came to the UK, Darius trained in Poland, learning how to perform a cut-throat shave by smothering an inflated balloon in shaving foam and then removing it with a single blade.
  • (16) Sediment can smother seagrasses, which are the key food source of dugongs and sea turtles, and damage corals.
  • (17) White supremacy in America won’t let our black young children be kids, swim or receive congratulations while graduating without having the breath, light and life smothered right out of them.
  • (18) Liverpool had threatened only sporadically, although Kasper Schmeichel did make a decent save to smother Coutinho’s shot.
  • (19) The Quagga mussel ( Dreissena rostriformis bugensis ), which was found in the river Wraysbury on 1 October and can cover boat hulls and smother native mussels to death, is just one of a group of freshwater species that has been spreading westward from the Ponto-Caspian region in south-east Europe in recent years and which risk causing a “meltdown” as they invade Britain.
  • (20) It added: "We have long argued that stamp duty is a tax on aspiration that smothered the natural demand of the market.

Suffocate


Definition:

  • (a.) Suffocated; choked.
  • (v. t.) To choke or kill by stopping respiration; to stifle; to smother.
  • (v. t.) To destroy; to extinguish; as, to suffocate fire.
  • (v. i.) To become choked, stifled, or smothered.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In his only specific growth measure, he said Britain's planning laws would have to be scrapped so more housing could be built, vowing to scrap "the suffocating bureaucracy" that he said was holding economic growth back.
  • (2) Because of inspiration into the tracheo-bronchial aireays, regurgitation from purely oesophageal diseases can provoke various respiratory affections: acute broncho-pulmonary blocking broncho-pneumonia, pulmonary suppuration, night cough, fits of nocturnal suffocation, chronic bronchitis sometimes hemoptic.
  • (3) An orderly process of dealing with asylum claims at the earliest point would be infinitely preferable to desperate families laying siege to central European railway stations, risking their lives clinging on to vehicles at Calais or suffocating in vehicles transporting them across borders.
  • (4) If any of them is neglected or isolated from the rest, the whole will be impoverished-the student will suffocate in disconnected, empirical facts; fanciful theories will be spun from tenuous evidence; well established theory will be neglected by the practitioner; the best-intentioned schemes will have disastrous long-term consequences.
  • (5) But his growing band of critics fear the suffocation of democracy and human rights.
  • (6) There is nothing he said which could be understood as an incitement to violence, and nothing which is not obviously true, and commonplace outside the squalid little dogma that suffocates the human spirit in Saudi.
  • (7) On day one, we were almost stampeded by elephants, and I had to suffocate a goat and then drink its blood directly from the jugular.
  • (8) I marvel now at how he learned to anchor himself – physically and mentally – in that suffocating darkness.
  • (9) This trip to Basel should, in theory, be as tough as it gets and that layer of insurance may have helped Hodgson’s team to play without feeling too suffocated by external pressures.
  • (10) In sum, we will render impotent the government's efforts to use its coercive pressure over corporations to suffocate not only WikiLeaks but any other group it may similarly target in the future.
  • (11) Every weekend ... you end up getting suffocated by what happens on the football field.
  • (12) "We are so used to seeing one idea of what a young man or woman is in the popular media," she says, adding that it is "suffocating" how homogeneously young people are represented on screen.
  • (13) Patients with advanced esophageal carcinoma with tracheobronchial obstruction usually present with severe dyspnea or hemoptysis or both and may die of suffocation.
  • (14) His head pounds, “my chest gets heavy, stomach gets tight” and “I feel suffocated, anxious.” “I have difficulty breathing at the end of the day, my face is black with soot,” says Kumar, waiting for his next fare on a noisy corner in south Delhi, beside a road jammed with honking cars, trucks and buses.
  • (15) The notoriously suffocating tone of the 50th anniversary in 1966, when veterans of 1916 were still alive and the all-Ireland republic was treated as unfinished business, has been replaced by a more open and inclusive approach today, as the rising recedes into history, though without diminishing its narrative potency.
  • (16) From 1 January, residents in India’s capital city, which had been suffocating under a blanket of smog in recent days, will only be able to drive on alternate days based on their licence plate number; odd numbers on one day, even on the other.
  • (17) Some were related to age group specific behaviour, such as drownings and falls in young children and suffocations in infants.
  • (18) But is it really so bad that Lydia refuses to conform to the strict and suffocating conventions of female propriety?
  • (19) She died of the suffocation caused by bronchopneumonia at the age of 60 years.
  • (20) With Greece suffocating under capital controls and the banks fighting for survival under a mountain of bad debt, a main focus of the bailout programme is saving and reviving the banking sector through the recapitalisation of ailing financial institutions.