Adequate vs Unique - What's the difference?
adequate | unique |
Equal to some requirement; proportionate, or correspondent; fully sufficient; as, powers adequate to a great work; an adequate definition lawfully and physically sufficient.
* De Quincey
* Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Empty House
(obsolete) To equalize; to make adequate.
(obsolete) To equal.
(not comparable) Being the only one of its kind; unequaled, unparalleled or unmatched.
*
*
* {{quote-book, year=1963, author=(Margery Allingham)
, title=(The China Governess)
, chapter=3 *
*
Of a feature, such that only one holder has it.
Particular, characteristic.
* '>citation
(proscribed) Of a rare quality, unusual.
* {{quote-book, passage=And as I look back, it seems to me that we were fairly unique , the sixty of us, in that there wasn’t one good mixer in the bunch.
, title=For Esmé—With Love and Squalor
, author=J.D. Salinger
, year=1950}}
A thing without a like; something unequalled or unparallelled.
* De Quincey
As adjectives the difference between adequate and unique
is that adequate is while unique is (not comparable) being the only one of its kind; unequaled, unparalleled or unmatched.As a noun unique is
a thing without a like; something unequalled or unparallelled.adequate
English
Alternative forms
* (archaic)Adjective
(en adjective)- Ireland had no adequate champion.
- All day, as I drove upon my round, I turned over the case in my mind and found no explanation which appeared to me to be adequate .
Antonyms
* inadequateVerb
(adequat)- (Fotherby)
- It [is] an impossibility for any creature to adequate God in his eternity. — Shelford.
unique
English
Adjective
(en adjective)citation, passage=‘[…] There's every Staffordshire crime-piece ever made in this cabinet, and that's unique . The Van Hoyer Museum in New York hasn't that very rare second version of Maria Marten's Red Barn over there, nor the little Frederick George Manning—he was the criminal Dickens saw hanged on the roof of the gaol in Horsemonger Lane, by the way—’}}
Usage notes
The comparative and superlative forms more unique'' and ''most unique'', as well as the use of ''unique'' with modifiers as in ''fairly unique'' and ''very unique , are sometimes proscribed, with the reasoning that either something is unique or it is not.Synonyms
(checksyns) * one of a kind * sui generis * singularDerived terms
* uniquenessNoun
(en noun)- The phoenix, the unique of birds.