Bite vs Nibble - What's the difference?
bite | nibble |
To cut off a piece by clamping the teeth.
To hold something by clamping one's teeth.
To attack with the teeth.
To behave aggressively; to reject advances.
To take hold; to establish firm contact with.
To have significant effect, often negative.
(of a fish) To bite a baited hook or other lure and thus be caught.
(metaphor) To accept something offered, often secretly or deceptively, to cause some action by the acceptor.
(intransitive, transitive, of an insect) To sting.
To cause a smarting sensation; to have a property which causes such a sensation; to be pungent.
To cause sharp pain, or smarting, to; to hurt or injure, in a literal or a figurative sense.
* Shakespeare
To cause sharp pain; to produce anguish; to hurt or injure; to have the property of so doing.
* Bible, Proverbs xxiii. 32
To take or keep a firm hold.
To take hold of; to hold fast; to adhere to.
* Charles Dickens
(slang) To lack quality; to be worthy of derision; to suck.
(transitive, informal, vulgar) To perform oral sex on. (Used in invective).
(intransitive, AAVE, slang) To plagiarize, to imitate.
The act of .
* Walton
The wound left behind after having been bitten.
The swelling of one's skin caused by an insect's mouthparts or sting.
A piece of food of a size that would be produced by ; a mouthful.
(slang) Something unpleasant.
(slang) An act of plagiarism.
A small meal or snack.
(figuratively) aggression
* {{quote-news, year=2011
, date=March 2
, author=Saj Chowdhury
, title=Man City 3 - 0 Aston Villa
, work=BBC
The hold which the short end of a lever has upon the thing to be lifted, or the hold which one part of a machine has upon another.
(colloquial, dated) A cheat; a trick; a fraud.
* Humorist
(colloquial, dated, slang) A sharper; one who cheats.
(printing) A blank on the edge or corner of a page, owing to a portion of the frisket, or something else, intervening between the type and paper.
(Webster 1913)
A small, quick bite taken with the front teeth.
(in the plural, nibbles) Small snacks such as crisps/potato chips or nuts, often eaten to accompany drinks.
To eat with small, quick bites.
* 2 November 2014 , Alex James in (The Guardian),
*:Giant parrots nibbled seed from the children's fingertips and my sister peeled a couple of satsumas for the lemurs.
* 1911 , (Rudyard Kipling), Big Steamers
*:"For the bread that you eat and the biscuits you nibble ,
*:The sweets that you suck and the joints that you carve,
*:They are brought to you daily by all us Big Steamers--
*:And if anyone hinders our coming you'll starve!"
To bite lightly.
To consume gradually.
* 11 May 2011 , Ann Carrns in The (New York Times),
*:A report out this week from the National Consumer Law Center lays out a host of ways in which banks nibble away at jobless benefits with fees the center called “junk.”
(computing) A unit of memory equal to half a byte, or four bits.http://foldoc.org/nibble
* 1993 , Richard E. Haskell, Introduction to computer engineering (page 287)
In transitive terms the difference between bite and nibble
is that bite is to take hold of; to hold fast; to adhere to while nibble is to bite lightly.bite
English
Verb
- As soon as you bite that sandwich, you'll know how good it is.
- That dog is about to bite !
- If you see me, come and say hello. I don't bite .
- I needed snow chains to make the tires bite .
- For homeowners with adjustable rate mortgages, rising interest will really bite .
- Are the fish biting today?
- I've planted the story. Do you think they'll bite ?
- These mosquitoes are really biting today!
- It bites like pepper or mustard.
- Pepper bites the mouth.
- Frosts do bite the meads.
- At the last it [wine] biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.
- The anchor bites .
- The anchor bites the ground.
- The last screw of the rack having been turned so often that its purchase crumbled, it turned and turned with nothing to bite .
- This music really bites .
- You don't like that I sat on your car? Bite me.
- He always be biting my moves.
Derived terms
* bite back * bite in the ass * bite me * bite off * bite off more than one can chew * bite one's knuckle * bite one's tongue * biter * bite someone's head off * bite the big one * bite the bullet * bite the dust * bite the hand that feeds one * bitingNoun
(en noun)- I have known a very good fisher angle diligently four or six hours for a river carp, and not have a bite .
- That snake bite really hurts!
- After just one night in the jungle I was covered with mosquito bites .
- There were only a few bites left on the plate.
- That's really a bite !
- That song is a bite of my song!
- I'll have a quick bite to quiet my stomach until dinner.
citation, page= , passage=City scored the goals but periods of ball possession were shared - the difference being Villa lacked bite in the opposition final third.}}
- The baser methods of getting money by fraud and bite , by deceiving and overreaching.
- (Johnson)
Synonyms
* (act of biting) * (wound left behind after having been bitten) * (sense, swelling caused by an insect's mouthparts or sting) sting * (piece of food of a size that would be produced by biting) mouthful * * * (small meal or snack) snack *Derived terms
* bitemark * bite-sized * bite stick * crossbite * in one bite * overbite * snake-bite, snakebite * underbitenibble
English
Etymology 1
Perhaps from (etyl) .Noun
(en noun)Derived terms
* nibblyVerb
(nibbl)- The rabbit nibbled the lettuce.
The day I came face-to-face with a tiger
- He nibbled at my neck and made me shiver.
Prepaid Cards Subject Jobless to Host of Fees
Etymology 2
From nibble', punning on the homophony of '''byte''' and ' biteAlternative forms
* nybbleNoun
(en noun)- That is, the lower nibble (the 4 bits 1010 = A) has been masked to zero.