What's the difference between spill and stumble?

Spill


Definition:

  • (n.) A bit of wood split off; a splinter.
  • (n.) A slender piece of anything.
  • (n.) A peg or pin for plugging a hole, as in a cask; a spile.
  • (n.) A metallic rod or pin.
  • (n.) A small roll of paper, or slip of wood, used as a lamplighter, etc.
  • (n.) One of the thick laths or poles driven horizontally ahead of the main timbering in advancing a level in loose ground.
  • (n.) A little sum of money.
  • (v. t.) To cover or decorate with slender pieces of wood, metal, ivory, etc.; to inlay.
  • (v. t.) To destroy; to kill; to put an end to.
  • (v. t.) To mar; to injure; to deface; hence, to destroy by misuse; to waste.
  • (v. t.) To suffer to fall or run out of a vessel; to lose, or suffer to be scattered; -- applied to fluids and to substances whose particles are small and loose; as, to spill water from a pail; to spill quicksilver from a vessel; to spill powder from a paper; to spill sand or flour.
  • (v. t.) To cause to flow out and be lost or wasted; to shed, or suffer to be shed, as in battle or in manslaughter; as, a man spills another's blood, or his own blood.
  • (v. t.) To relieve a sail from the pressure of the wind, so that it can be more easily reefed or furled, or to lessen the strain.
  • (v. i.) To be destroyed, ruined, or wasted; to come to ruin; to perish; to waste.
  • (v. i.) To be shed; to run over; to fall out, and be lost or wasted.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) When you have champions of financial rectitude such as the International Monetary Fund and OECD warning of the international risk of an "explosion of social unrest" and arguing for a new fiscal stimulus if growth continues to falter, it's hardly surprising that tensions in the cabinet over next month's spending review are spilling over.
  • (2) According to Nigerian government figures, there were more than 7,000 spills between 1970 and 2000, and there are 2,000 official major spillage sites, many going back decades, with thousands of smaller spills still waiting to be cleared up.
  • (3) In another patient, there were symptoms of drug overdose when the contents of the balloon spilled into the intestinal tract.
  • (4) It was, as we say in French, the drop of water that made the glass spill over.
  • (5) I couldn't shake the harsh words from my head and worried about if, or when, they would spill over into real life.
  • (6) My role as deputy is to support the leader, not to change the leader, and I don’t support a spill motion.” “I support the prime minister, I support the leader.
  • (7) And it has left the international community floundering as it tries to respond to conflicts spilling across the globe.
  • (8) And so I would stare at a discarded popcorn box, a spilled drink or simply the darkness that disappeared into the seat ahead of me – listening carefully to quickening breaths – allowing the film’s soundscape to caress me.
  • (9) Tony Abbott has heard the message on the need to change his leadership style, a senior minister has said, warning the prime minister’s detractors against moving an “amateur-hour” spill motion next week.
  • (10) Oil is coating birds and delicate wetlands along the Louisiana coast, and the political fallout from the spill has reached Washington, where the head of the federal agency that oversees offshore drilling resigned today.
  • (11) Droplets of each admixture were placed on stainless steel, laboratory coat cloth, pieces of latex examination glove, bench-top absorbent padding, and other materials on which antineoplastics might spill or leak.
  • (12) Jeremy Hunt has been forced into a partial climbdown in his dispute with NHS junior doctors in an attempt to stop their fury at a threatened punitive new contract spilling over into strike action.
  • (13) Three years of frustration at the torpor he found at the centre of the party spills out.
  • (14) Spills in the US are responded to in minutes; in the Niger delta, which suffers more pollution each year than the Gulf of Mexico, it can take companies weeks or more.
  • (15) Couple this with the revelation that degrees might not even be worth the investment, and the sense of betrayal from those who have already graduated risks spilling over.
  • (16) Tottenham’s Danny Rose apologises for setting bad example in Chelsea draw Read more The ill feeling spilled over into the tunnel at the end as Spurs and Chelsea players got involved in a rolling maul which led to the home manager Guus Hiddink being sent flying and his counterpart Mauricio Pochettino attemping to prise the multiple brawlers apart.
  • (17) The time to hand over the reins came and went, Keating challenged and lost, before heading to the backbench to lick his wounds and shore up the factional numbers needed for a successful spill.
  • (18) The serum triglyceride of the patients in group 4 (highest urinary glucose content and spills) was significantly elevated above three other groups with less glucosuria.
  • (19) For example, one victim of the federal cuts is oil spill response units , which means that drilling and pipeline projects will become even riskier.
  • (20) BP would need to bring equipment from Texas to contain South Australia oil spill Read more BP plans to drill the first of four exploratory wells off the South Australian coast next year and submitted an environmental plan (pdf) for approval to the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority last week.

Stumble


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To trip in walking or in moving in any way with the legs; to strike the foot so as to fall, or to endanger a fall; to stagger because of a false step.
  • (v. i.) To walk in an unsteady or clumsy manner.
  • (v. i.) To fall into a crime or an error; to err.
  • (v. i.) To strike or happen (upon a person or thing) without design; to fall or light by chance; -- with on, upon, or against.
  • (v. t.) To cause to stumble or trip.
  • (v. t.) Fig.: To mislead; to confound; to perplex; to cause to err or to fall.
  • (n.) A trip in walking or running.
  • (n.) A blunder; a failure; a fall from rectitude.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell, also weighed in for Clinton in a New York Times opinion piece on Friday, declaring: “Donald J Trump is not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.” Republicans stumbling from the wreckage of a terrible week are worrying about how to contain the damage further down the ballot paper in November as people running for seats in Congress and at state level risk being swept away.
  • (2) On Saturday I made my second trip to the campsite in Lower Stumble – my first journey was on 28 July.
  • (3) 11.10pm BST Apart from the stumbles in the sales pitch, it's still not clear how the Abbott government will secure most of its budget.
  • (4) CBS, which says it stumbled across its advance copy in a bookstore, happens to own the book's publisher, Simon & Schuster.
  • (5) However, the main stumbling block is the increasingly chronic shortage of many different types of medical staff – nurses, GPs, paramedics, radiologists, A&E doctors and many others – that the NHS is facing.
  • (6) The surprise move came after Tuesday's much-noticed stumble, when the US supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, jumbled the words, prompting Obama to follow suit.
  • (7) Myners – a non-executive director of Co-op group – was also scathing in his assessment of the board members after asking them a simple retail question and likening their inability to answer to that of Paul Flowers, former chairman of the Co-op bank, who had stumbled over basic questions posed by the Treasury select committee last year.
  • (8) Unfortunately, a lack of knowledge regarding the field among the general public and within the medical community as well functions as a major stumbling block to the growth of our profession.
  • (9) He may not be the greatest orator, sometimes stressing the wrong word in a sentence or stumbling over his Autocue, and he may not deliver media-managed soundbites with the ease that the PM does, but he is good with the public.
  • (10) Polls opened at 4am across the country, which suffered decades of army-led dictatorship followed by a stumbling reform process.
  • (11) Just a stepover here, a Cruyff turn there, and his opponent would be destroyed ... Only in real life, Boruc stumbled and bumbled and Olivier Giroud pounced to score.
  • (12) In the most uncomfortable and revelatory moments, Cameron stumbled as he was asked whether he saw Brooks every weekend in 2008 and 2009, before his wife Samantha told him in the lunchtime break that they had met every six weeks, or a bit more.
  • (13) He was like the man with staring eyes who stumbled up and down Oxford Street with a placard declaring the end of the world to be nigh.
  • (14) So intense was the pre‑match excitement in Dortmund over the return of the prodigal Jürg – much of it media-led – that walking around this flat, functional city on the afternoon of the game you half expected to stumble across Klopp shrines, New Orleans-style Klopp jazz funerals, to look up and find his great beaming visage looming over the city like some vast alien saucer.
  • (15) It is essential, therefore, that a legal agreement is agreed at the COP21 talks in order to create a process after Paris through which countries will review their efforts and find ways to ramp up their actions on reducing emissions.” A major stumbling block facing negotiators at Paris will be finance.
  • (16) Poyet will feel infinitely worse should Sunderland stumble once again at Spurs.
  • (17) There are pages where, unexpectedly, amid the horror, a reader feels he has stumbled on a near-inconsequential diary entry.
  • (18) She stumbled to her door, but found she could not walk out; she had to crawl as the ground swayed beneath her.
  • (19) Diane Abbott will continue to be a key figurehead in Labour’s general election campaign, the party has indicated, despite a stumbling radio performance in which she struggled to explain how a pledge to hire 10,000 extra police officers would be funded.
  • (20) But in that case, it will inevitably be harder to re-establish confidence in the intelligence on which the White House is basing its decisions, and the world's sole superpower risks stumbling onwards half-blind, unable to distinguish real threats from phantoms.