What's the difference between stumble and totter?

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.

Totter


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To shake so as to threaten a fall; to vacillate; to be unsteady; to stagger; as,an old man totters with age.
  • (v. i.) To shake; to reel; to lean; to waver.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Most ship-breaking workers are migrants from the north who rent rooms in the warren of makeshift shanties that totter over the water’s edge.
  • (2) The European Union (EU), one of the more promising developments of the post-world war II period, has been tottering because of the harsh effect of the policies of austerity during recession, condemned even by the economists of the International Monetary Fund (if not the IMF’s political actors).
  • (3) In one allele of the tottering locus, a pathogenetic lesion linking noradrenergic hyperinnervation with cortical spike-wave discharges has been identified.
  • (4) The most significant difference from last year's London event is that instead of a tottering and discredited transitional regime, Somalia now has a fully fledged government, led by Hassan Sheikh Mohamud.
  • (5) But the damage of a Greek exit will be out of all proportion to its size, as other dominoes totter, damaging confidence and trade even if they don't fall.
  • (6) As she tottered around a crime scene in high heels, I had the strong feeling that Cubitt, now directing the series as well as writing it, had put out of his mind altogether the cries of misogyny that trailed the first series.
  • (7) It means you can totter into the kitchen to put the kettle on 10 times a day.
  • (8) There are few precedents for such an explosive political ascent in modern western Europe; in Spain, a discredited political elite appears to be tottering.
  • (9) Hippocampal CA3 pyramidal neurons in the adult epileptic mutant mouse tottering (tg) show normal intrinsic membrane properties, yet fire abnormally prolonged paroxysmal depolarizing shifts (PDS) during in vitro exposure to elevated extracellular potassium solutions.
  • (10) Immunocytochemical staining for tyrosine hydroxylase demonstrated the pronounced hyperinnervation in the "tottering" brain, whereas both serotonin and choline acetyltransferase immunostaining were similar between "tottering" and wild type.
  • (11) Leading care and health bodies are demanding crisis talks with ministers over the unravelling of measures in George Osborne ’s spending review that were supposed to prop up the tottering social care system.
  • (12) Older versions of 1980s and 1990s politicians – Lord Carrington, John Prescott – tottered in and out of the chamber.
  • (13) It's not easy and, with Tom and I hoisting him up, we worry that he might totter and fall.
  • (14) But in El Salvador the challenge is exacerbated by tottering public institutions, high rates of sexual violence, inadequate sex education and a backdrop of violence and gang warfare which are undermining efforts to control the outbreak.
  • (15) The two bankers are also heard laughing and joking at a time when the bank was tottering on the brink of destruction.
  • (16) No significant difference in Bmax or Kd values was identified between adult tottering and control mice in any of the tissue preparations.
  • (17) The petit-mal seizures of the "tottering" mutant mouse (tg) have been attributed to an exaggerated noradrenergic projection from locus coeruleus to the telencephalon (Noebels 1984).
  • (18) The tottering mouse resulted from a recessively inherited, autosomal, single-locus mutation which produces a very characteristic neurological and cellular phenotype.
  • (19) Occasionally it is alleged that the billet began to totter during the stroke and that the left hand responded to this stimulus by an unwilled movement to the billet.
  • (20) I see an extremely united front.” Unity is all the more necessary ahead of the Dutch elections in March and the French presidential elections , in the spring in which the anti-EU populists Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen threaten upsets that would, together or separately, represent existential threats to the tottering European project.