What's the difference between stagger and stumble?

Stagger


Definition:

  • (n.) To move to one side and the other, as if about to fall, in standing or walking; not to stand or walk with steadiness; to sway; to reel or totter.
  • (n.) To cease to stand firm; to begin to give way; to fail.
  • (n.) To begin to doubt and waver in purposes; to become less confident or determined; to hesitate.
  • (v. t.) To cause to reel or totter.
  • (v. t.) To cause to doubt and waver; to make to hesitate; to make less steady or confident; to shock.
  • (v. t.) To arrange (a series of parts) on each side of a median line alternately, as the spokes of a wheel or the rivets of a boiler seam.
  • (n.) An unsteady movement of the body in walking or standing, as if one were about to fall; a reeling motion; vertigo; -- often in the plural; as, the stagger of a drunken man.
  • (n.) A disease of horses and other animals, attended by reeling, unsteady gait or sudden falling; as, parasitic staggers; appopletic or sleepy staggers.
  • (n.) Bewilderment; perplexity.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Clinton lost the presidency and Democrats lost those seats, as Democrats suffered staggering defeats across two branches of government.
  • (2) On admission, neurological examination revealed staggering gait and the right cerebellar ataxia showing dysmetria and dysdiadochokinesis.
  • (3) These observations suggest that the inner dynein arms in Chlamydomonas axonemes are aligned not in a single straight row, but in a staggered row or two discrete rows.
  • (4) You’d be staggered by the number of dimwitted debutantes who stand for photos next to cakes iced with the famous double-C. You know how you wanted a Spider-Man cake when you were little, and your mum made you Spider-Man cake, and it was the happiest birthday of your life?
  • (5) There are rumours that this is the case again and I can't imagine what these people are thinking, it staggers me.
  • (6) Terminase, the DNA packaging enzyme of phage lambda, binds to lambda DNA at a site called cosB, and introduces staggered nicks at an adjacent site, cosN, to generate the cohesive ends of virion lambda DNA molecules.
  • (7) When allowance was made for specific pairing between extrahelical and helical domains, the so-called D-staggered (D = 670 A) alignment of molecules was preferred, as opposed to a nonstaggered, or nematic, alignment.
  • (8) Staggerer cerebellar cortex exhibits the greatest fluorescence with most terminals appearing as matted tangles adjacent cell bodies.
  • (9) Speaking about the forthcoming T-charge, Khan said: “It’s staggering that we live in a city where the air is so toxic that many of our children are growing up with lung problems.
  • (10) The metabolism of 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) in the CNS was investigated in four kinds of morphologically different ataxic mice; reeler, staggerer, weaver and Purkinje cell degeneration mutants, and in hypocerebellar mice experimentally produced by injection of cytosine arabinoside.
  • (11) The Saints, who started the day third in the table, went marching on thanks to their own swish play and some staggering defending by the visitors.
  • (12) The sliding splint-staples, generally two, are placed in staggered positions behind the sternum (11 cases--funnel chest) or in front of the sternum (2 cases--pigeon chest).
  • (13) water retention, depression, transient staggering and phlebitis).
  • (14) Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yemen government ground forces and Saudi-led air strikes attack Houthi militias The blockade – which is also being enforced in the air and on land – has choked a fragile economy already staggering under the impact of a six-month civil conflict pitting Yemeni forces loyal to the President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, now exiled in Riyadh, against Houthi rebels allied to his predecessor and rival, Ali Abdullah Saleh.
  • (15) Lucie Faucherre, junior policy analyst, Gender Equality and Women’s Rights OECD , Paris, France, @luciefaucherre Include youth voices: Today, young people under 30 make up a staggering 50% of our world’s population.
  • (16) The men's list was published in September and saw Johnny Depp on top with a staggering $75m in annual earnings.
  • (17) The staggering figure – one of the worst bombings in 13 years of war in Iraq – has cast a pall on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan and which begins on Wednesday in Iraq .
  • (18) The main symptom "incoordination" (ataxia, asynergy, paresis, paralysis) is used by us more precisely only in case of impairment of nervous system by neoplastic infiltrations and does not signify as possible symptoms of general physical weakness, for example faltering, staggering, tumbling or lameness.
  • (19) In the presence of Co+2 ion, the primer specificity is altered so that all forms of duplex DNA molecules can be labeled at their unique 3'-ends regardless of whether such ends are staggered or even.
  • (20) In examining two different sets of experiments, it is proposed that staggered joint interpolation is the underlying planning strategy.

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.