What's the difference between sordid and squalid?

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".

Squalid


Definition:

  • (a.) Dirty through neglect; foul; filthy; extremely dirty.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It’s another squalid reminder of Conservative priorities, and how low they are prepared to sink in pursuit of them.
  • (2) Winston Churchill, when he was offered the role of minister of the local government board in 1906, commented: "There is no place more laborious, more anxious, more thankless, more cloaked with petty and even squalid detail, more full of hopeless and insoluble difficulties."
  • (3) But one has a right to demand what purpose it fulfils," wrote the Times's critic, who felt that Bond's "blockishly naturalistic piece, full of dead domestic longueurs and slavishly literal bawdry", would "supply valuable ammunition to those who attack modern drama as half-baked, gratuitously violent and squalid".
  • (4) Yesterday, all 12 GPs at a hospital in northern Greece quit their jobs to protest the squalid conditions in which they were forced to work as a result of repeated cuts.
  • (5) The transformation of the North Sea billions into tax cuts for the wealthy is the same process but at its most squalid.
  • (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) Thousands of citizens have been forgotten in this squalid area, remaining here for more than four years.
  • (8) An investigation into gastrointestinal helminthiasis in human and dog population of the Kainji Lake area revealed a high prevalence of helminthiasis which may be due to lack of adequate health and veterinary facilities; crowdiness and squalid environment.
  • (9) Both harangued Brian from the outset calling it "a squalid little film" and "tenth rate"; no amount of measured argument on the Pythons part would dissuade the pious double act of their firmly held belief that Life of Brian mocked Christ.
  • (10) The awarding of the World Cup to Qatar has proved hugely controversial, particularly the treatment of the thousands of foreign workers , mainly from south Asian nations, many of whom have been put up in squalid accommodation, had their pay withheld or delayed, and their passports confiscated.
  • (11) Since the closure of the Macedonian border, more than 40,000 refugees have been trapped in squalid conditions in Greece.
  • (12) Social care is in crisis, leaving half a million frail old people with no care at all, while others get notoriously perfunctory 15-minute home visits or often squalid residential care.
  • (13) Up to 2,000 people, including children as young as eight, sought shelter in the informal camp Jamshid and Mati are staying in, made up of a cluster of squalid warehouses behind Belgrade’s main train station.
  • (14) And so I set off to do a little detective work of my own, to discover whether Maigret’s Paris, full of squalid, storied hotels with communal bathrooms, apartment buildings with nosy concierges and, most importantly, characterful regional bistros and hyper-provincial bars, could still be found.
  • (15) But in the end they settled for a squalid little deal stitched up behind closed doors .
  • (16) Grand promises of Paris climate deal undermined by squalid retrenchments Read more I’m talking to Howard Bamsey, who I’ve encountered at many of these events – he was Australia’s lead negotiator in Kyoto in 1997 when the protocol was agreed as well as the special envoy on climate change in Copenhagen in 2009.
  • (17) There are more than 100,000 Roma in Italy and roughly 8,000 of them live in squalid conditions on the outskirts of Rome in authorised camps that have been compared to segregated ghettoes.
  • (18) It is unseemly and squalid, after unanswered Greek requests for the marbles’ return, for the statue’s first move outside Britain to be to a country we ourselves have placed under sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine.
  • (19) Their loved ones, sitting in court, heard survivors recall the terror and horror of being trapped between the iron railings of the squalid Leppings Lane terrace: the vomiting, faces turning blue, screams for help ignored by police, the cracking of ribs, evacuation of bowels and bladders, the public deaths.
  • (20) A series of investigations have found migrant workers, who make up more than 80% of Qatar’s population, living in squalid conditions with many toiling for low wages to pay back loans from unscrupulous recruitment agencies in their country of origin.