Awful vs Critical - What's the difference?
awful | critical | Related terms |
Oppressing with fear or horror; appalling, terrible.
Inspiring awe; filling with profound reverence or respect; profoundly impressive.
*, I.56:
* 1819 , Lord Byron, Don Juan , II.143:
Struck or filled with awe.
(obsolete) Terror-stricken.
Worshipful; reverential; law-abiding.
Exceedingly great; usually applied intensively.
Very bad.
(colloquial) Very, extremely; as, an awful big house.
Inclined to find fault or criticize; fastidious; captious; censorious; exacting.
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Pertaining to, or indicating, a crisis or turning point.
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*:Such a scandal as the prosecution of a brother for forgery—with a verdict of guilty—is a most truly horrible, deplorable, fatal thing. It takes the respectability out of a family perhaps at a critical moment, when the family is just assuming the robes of respectability:it is a black spot which all the soaps ever advertised could never wash off.
Extremely important.
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*{{quote-magazine, year=2013, month=September-October, author=
, magazine=(American Scientist), title= Relating to criticism or careful analysis, such as literary or film criticism.
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(lb) Of a patient condition involving unstable vital signs and a prognosis that predicts the condition could worsen; or, a patient condition that requires urgent treatment in an intensive care or critical care medical facility.
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Likely to go out of control if disturbed, that is, opposite of stable.
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Of the point (in temperature, reagent concentration etc.) where a nuclear or chemical reaction becomes self-sustaining.
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A critical value, factor, etc.
* 1976 , American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Journal of engineering for industry (volume 98, page 508)
* 2008 , John J. Coyle, C. John Langley, Brian Gibson, Supply Chain Management: A Logistics Perspective (page 564)
Awful is a related term of critical.
As adjectives the difference between awful and critical
is that awful is oppressing with fear or horror; appalling, terrible while critical is inclined to find fault or criticize; fastidious; captious; censorious; exacting.As an adverb awful
is (colloquial) very, extremely; as, an awful big house.As a noun critical is
a critical value, factor, etc.awful
English
Alternative forms
* awfull (archaic)Adjective
(en-adj)- God ought not to be commixed in our actions, but with awful reverence, and an attention full of honour and respect.
- And then she stopped, and stood as if in awe / (For sleep is awful ).
- an awful bonnet
- I have learnt an awful amount today.
- My socks smell awful .
Usage notes
* Nouns to which "awful" is often applied: day, truth, time, place, moment, mess, night, news, state, situation, smell, thought, person, pain, movie, consequence, crime, fate, death, tragedy, man, event, disease, story, condition, mistake, taste, picture, year, calamity, doom, film, catastrophe, secret, performance, storm, end, week, shape, choice.Synonyms
* See alsoAdverb
(-)See also
* awfully.External links
* *critical
English
Adjective
(en adjective)Katie L. Burke
In the News, passage=Oxygen levels on Earth skyrocketed 2.4 billion years ago, when cyanobacteria evolved photosynthesis:
Derived terms
{{der3, criticality , critically , criticalness , critical angle , critical mass , critical point , critical thinking , mission-critical , pseudocritical , supercritical}}See also
* (wikipedia "critical") * (Medical state)Noun
(en noun)- The second undamped system criticals show a greater percentage depression than the first.
- Finally, criticals are high-risk, high-value items that give the final product a competitive advantage in the marketplace Criticals, in part, determine the customer's ultimate cost of using the finished product — in our example, the computer.