What's the difference between stubborn and tenacious?

Stubborn


Definition:

  • (a.) Firm as a stub or stump; stiff; unbending; unyielding; persistent; hence, unreasonably obstinate in will or opinion; not yielding to reason or persuasion; refractory; harsh; -- said of persons and things; as, stubborn wills; stubborn ore; a stubborn oak; as stubborn as a mule.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It has announced a four-stage programme of reforms that will tackle most of these stubborn and longstanding problems, including Cinderella issues such as how energy companies treat their small business customers.
  • (2) Of course there are some who are stubborn, like Robert Mugabe.
  • (3) The prime minister insisted, however, that he and other world leaders were not being stubborn over demands that the Syrian leader, President Bashar al-Assad, step down at the end of the peace process.
  • (4) It’s clear their relationship is most similar to that of a stubborn son and his long suffering mother.
  • (5) The contrast between these two worlds – one legal and flourishing, the other illegal and stubbornly disregarding of state lines – can seem baffling, yet it may have profound consequences for whether this unique experiment spreads.
  • (6) The causes of failure after acute injury include extensive local soft tissue and bony damage, severe concomitant head, chest or abdominal wounding, stubborn reliance on negative arteriograms in patients with probable arterial injury, failure to repair simultaneous venous injuries, or harvesting of a vein graft from a severely damaged extremity.
  • (7) "It was the character of David Cameron – his stubbornness, his anger and his rush towards war – which was the central cause of his defeat on Thursday night."
  • (8) Rebus, promised the Scottish author, will be "as stubborn and anarchic as ever", and will find himself in trouble with the author's latest creation, Malcolm Fox, of Edinburgh's internal affairs unit.
  • (9) A rising jobless total and an unemployment rate sticking at a stubbornly high 8% overshadowed a better than expected 27,100 fall in the claimant count in April, which compared with analysts' forecasts for a 20,000 drop.
  • (10) But the part of me that resists that, that is stubborn and wants to bulldoze things, gets in my way.
  • (11) One is the stubborn mystery of how a giant of its liberation movements, an intellectual who showed forgiveness and magnanimity years before Mandela emerged from jail, could turn into the living caricature of despotism.
  • (12) Sanctioning is no longer a last resort tactic aimed at the stubbornly workshy, say critics, but a crude way of pushing down claimant numbers and cutting back on the benefits bill.
  • (13) He was only 29 at the time, but nevertheless had that kind of stubborn certainty.
  • (14) They have a sort of stubbornness.” He later deals with hecklers at a Fifa HQ press event : “Listen, gentlemen, we are not in a bazaar .
  • (15) Dombrovskis stubbornly refused, instead pursuing "internal devaluation", depressing wages and conducting what he says was a 17% fiscal adjustment programme (the IMF says 15%).
  • (16) They formed a stubborn line in front of Wojciech Szczesny’s goal even if the statistics showed Arsenal’s pass-completion rate went down from 89% in the first half to 66% in the second.
  • (17) This was the first time a grouping of BME senior managers crossing health and social care had met together to look at barriers to gaining top jobs, and ways of breaking through systems which stubbornly never seem to shift.
  • (18) Broadly defined, this sort of behaviour involves procrastination, stubbornness, resentment, sullenness, obstructionism, self-pity and a tendency to create chaotic situations.
  • (19) At which point – obviously – you reach the stubborn limits of the debate: from even the most supposedly imaginative Labour people as much as any Tories, such heresies would presumably be greeted with sneering derision.
  • (20) A stubborn negativity characterised the insurrection.

Tenacious


Definition:

  • (a.) Holding fast, or inclined to hold fast; inclined to retain what is in possession; as, men tenacious of their just rights.
  • (a.) Apt to retain; retentive; as, a tenacious memory.
  • (a.) Having parts apt to adhere to each other; cohesive; tough; as, steel is a tenacious metal; tar is more tenacious than oil.
  • (a.) Apt to adhere to another substance; glutinous; viscous; sticking; adhesive.
  • (a.) Niggardly; closefisted; miserly.
  • (a.) Holding stoutly to one's opinion or purpose; obstinate; stubborn.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The insurgency is still raging, and the president will have to inspire the security forces, choose generals to lead the fight, and plot tactics to beat a tenacious and experienced enemy.
  • (2) RSL trying to get their own flowing passing game going now, but the Timbers looking tenacious in midfield to break it up.
  • (3) Another factor is the decline of caste, the tenacious Indian social hierarchy which still determines the status of hundreds of millions.
  • (4) A tenacious Anabaena epiphyte was also discovered inhabiting the surfaces of root nodules.
  • (5) His family belonged to the Ghanchi caste, low down on the tenacious social hierarchy that still often defines status in India, and had little money.
  • (6) Another facilitating factor which is discussed is that blowing the nose may catch tenacious mucus which has partly passed through the ostium by the ciliary activity in the sinus.
  • (7) Malta continued to defend tenaciously after half-time and Italy struggled to create openings, despite their overwhelming dominance.
  • (8) However, attempts to cultivate M phi for morphological and functional studies have often been compromised because M phi adhere rapidly and tenaciously to cultureware.
  • (9) The exudate, apparent as early as 48 hours after inoculation, drained from the cervix as a tenacious, mucopurulent discharge for several days, then rapidly disappeared.
  • (10) Thirty-four patients, 21 male and 13 female, with chronic asthma and tenacious mucoid expectoration were studied regarding clinical parameters, PEF, airway resistance and sputum viscosity measured according to the n.m.r.
  • (11) Mark Lewis and Charlotte Harris, two tenacious solicitors, were followed around, together with their children.
  • (12) The cholla cacti are particularly tenacious in the manner in which the spines stay embedded in the skin.
  • (13) The action of complement is considered in terms of a more tenacious bond formed between effector and target cells.
  • (14) Two immunologically distinct proteins of 55 and 26 kd, which are tenaciously, but noncovalently associated with Oxytricha macronuclear DNA termini, have been purified.
  • (15) So they fought tenaciously, first over prices and then over privatisation.
  • (16) But the Justice Department attorney Ron Wiltsie, who impugned Xenakis’s credentials in tenacious cross-examination, said Dhiab had committed “five assaults since April 2014”.
  • (17) The observation that glucose phosphates bind to the Li+ complex of phosphoglucomutase some 900 times more tenaciously than to the corresponding Mg2+ complex could provide a partial rationale for the lack of reactivity of the Le+ form of the enzyme.
  • (18) "For rural areas, farmers, dalits (those at the bottom of India's tenacious social hierarchy), weak and the pained, this government is for them.
  • (19) [Small Talk, like the all-action investigative journalist that it is, tenaciously refuses to let the question go] And you're other half, she's an Irish pool international?
  • (20) Isis will then be reduced to what it once was: a very brutal and tenacious Iraqi militant organisation.