What's the difference between whack and wrack?

Whack


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To strike; to beat; to give a heavy or resounding blow to; to thrash; to make with whacks.
  • (v. i.) To strike anything with a smart blow.
  • (n.) A smart resounding blow.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Furthermore, a huge whack of his income comes from Rupert Murdoch.
  • (2) The cold, hard political calculation is that it makes more sense for the coalition to hit the poorest and weakest – by making swingeing cuts to welfare – than to whack the middle class or the powerful.
  • (3) If you are on the back end you are kind of playing whack-a-mole, trying to pick this up,” one source said.
  • (4) Consequently, after Hartson fed Jason Koumas on the right in the first minute and the ball was cleared to Savage on the edge of the Russian box, Savage whacked at the bouncing ball excitedly.
  • (5) There is a difference between grabbing a bedside lamp and whacking an intruder because you are worried about the children and hitting someone and then stabbing them 17 times," one source said.
  • (6) "The NSA has a slogan internally — 'we track 'em, you whack 'em' – where they help to target drone strikes."
  • (7) This is why, you see, people with rucksacks pummel all those in their immediate vicinity with their giant sacks as they trundle on their way, whacking them about as they blithely move about trains, pavements or any other public area.
  • (8) It was the happiest Luke Shaw had ever been to take a whack from one of his team-mates.
  • (9) Nor are they exotic Mafia hits like the killing of Castellano; these are low-level whackings, often linked to squabbles over drugs.
  • (10) Compare that with a sale price (including downloads) of $630 and Apple makes $452 on each phone: a whacking gross margin of 72%.
  • (11) But not past the always reliable Cole, who whacks it out for a corner.
  • (12) Fletcher had the image within a week, and the first thing he noticed was something that had been speculated to exist – “this whacking great canal coming down from the north”.
  • (13) The huge signs advertising a collapse in prices are already stacked in department stores’ stockrooms as the final spasm of Christmas Eve top-whack spending is taking place.
  • (14) He whacks the shields of policemen who earn less in a year than a banker does in a day.
  • (15) Historically, sadly, we never had a cost-control culture, they were out of whack.” Flybe has signed a five-year deal at City.
  • (16) Whacking the bankers directly and visibly – ensuring they pay back what they cost the rest of us – might have struck the right populist chord too.
  • (17) I remember an interview where he says he took great delight in whacking the opposing players whenever he had the chance."
  • (18) But ultimately, it’s human emissions that have thrown a pretty finely-tuned system out of whack.
  • (19) Instead, Ignatieff got whacked, and the left-leaning New Democratic party did very well indeed, astonishing even themselves.
  • (20) 9.11pm BST 67 min: Isco has a whack at the Atlético goal through a thicket of legs from the right-hand side of the D, but drags his effort well wide left.

Wrack


Definition:

  • (n.) A thin, flying cloud; a rack.
  • (v. t.) To rack; to torment.
  • (n.) Wreck; ruin; destruction.
  • (n.) Any marine vegetation cast up on the shore, especially plants of the genera Fucus, Laminaria, and Zostera, which are most abundant on northern shores.
  • (n.) Coarse seaweed of any kind.
  • (v. t.) To wreck.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) And it is wracked with cultural conflict between about 12,000 long-time Williston residents and at least 21,000 newcomers who’ve arrived over the past five-odd years.
  • (2) Cyclones will wrack the coast more frequently, and with more intensity.
  • (3) All three states have been wracked with conflict since December 2013, when a power struggle broke out between Salva Kiir, the South Sudanese president, and his former vice-president Riek Machar.
  • (4) Matt Wrack, the general secretary, said: "The government must realise that firefighters cannot accept proposals that would have such devastating consequences for their futures, their families' futures, and the future of the fire and rescue service itself.
  • (5) It represented the first confirmation of US military operations within insurgency-wracked Syria, where Isis gestated into the jihadist organisation that has redrawn the borders of the Middle East.
  • (6) Matt Wrack , the FBU general secretary, said: "The FBU has wanted to settle our dispute for a long time, but the government at Westminster is simply not listening.
  • (7) Yemen was already the poorest country in the Middle East, wracked by conflict and struggling in a transition to a more secure future.
  • (8) The Global Times wrote an editorial on Friday in which it noted that he is the first western official in recent years to have visited the violence-wracked region of Xinjiang and stressed its business potential instead of “finding fault over the human rights issue”.
  • (9) But with their host country wracked by civil war for nearly a year, they’ve had to make other plans.
  • (10) The mechanism of antimutagenicity of water extracts of grass-wrack pondweed (Potamogeton oxyphylus Miquel), curled pondweed (Potamogeton crispus L.) and smartweed (Polygonum hydropiper L.) towards benzo[a]pyrene mutagenicity in Salmonella typhimurium was investigated.
  • (11) In a region already wracked by water scarcity and conflict, more drying could ratchet up tension even further.
  • (12) The transcendence they are remembering is the aim of the art of dancing: the aim of a dancer's entire wracked body to become one with the music.
  • (13) 7.49pm BST Another Man In Suit accuses the Federal Reserve of being wracked with division.
  • (14) Committee members whose future in Momentum is in doubt include Jill Mountford, of the Trotskyist group Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, and the former Militant activist Nick Wrack, both of whom were expelled from the Labour party last year.
  • (15) The western powers played the decisive role in the overthrow of the Libyan regime – acting in the name of protecting civilians, who then died in their thousands in a Nato-escalated civil war, while conflict-wracked Syria was threatened with intervention and Iran with all-out attack.
  • (16) But as well as the absence of several key leaders, including Barack Obama , Angela Merkel and David Cameron , the conference organisers are struggling to adjust to the blurring of battles lines as Europe is wracked by crisis, and emerging economies of China, Brazil, India and Russia pull ahead of the rest of the developing world.
  • (17) In an email trail detailing exchanges between Momentum’s steering committee members, Chessum, an ally of Mountford and Wrack, grew increasingly exasperated as it became clear that the plans, which were drawn up secretly by Lansman, would be approved.
  • (18) The healthcare bill will funnel $100bn to states over a decade to stabilize what are sure to be markets wracked by chaos, assuming this legislation survives intact to Trump’s desk.
  • (19) As well as sending his spin on grunge, punk and rockabilly down the Saint Laurent catwalk, Slimane shoots all the label’s advertising campaigns and unveiled Saint Laurent’s new beginning under his direction with images of Christopher Owens , a classic rock lost boy with a back catalogue of wracked, emotional songs and an action-packed past.
  • (20) The former Himalayan kingdom has been wracked by protests in the wake of the killing of a popular young militant separatist by security forces on 8 July.

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