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Cancer vs Scab - What's the difference?

cancer | scab |

As nouns the difference between cancer and scab

is that cancer is cancer while scab is an incrustation over a sore, wound, vesicle, or pustule, formed during healing.

As a verb scab is

to become covered by a scab or scabs.

cancer

English

* (wikipedia "cancer")

Noun

(en noun)
  • (medicine, oncology, disease) A disease in which the cells of a tissue undergo uncontrolled (and often rapid) proliferation.
  • * {{quote-book, year=2006, author=(Edwin Black)
    • , title=Internal Combustion , chapter=1 citation , passage=If successful, Edison and Ford—in 1914—would move society away from the
  • * {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-22, volume=407, issue=8841, page=76, magazine=(The Economist)
    • , title= Snakes and ladders , passage=Risk is everywhere. From tabloid headlines insisting that coffee causes cancer (yesterday, of course, it cured it) to stern government warnings about alcohol and driving, the world is teeming with goblins. For each one there is a frighteningly precise measurement of just how likely it is to jump from the shadows and get you.}}
  • (figuratively) Something which spreads within something else, damaging the latter.
    • {{quote-book, year=1999, author=Bruce Clifford Ross-Larson, title=Effective Writing, page=134 citation
    , passage=Sierra Leone's post-dictator problems are almost absurd in their breadth. It once exported rice; now it can't feed itself. The life span of the average citizen is 39, the shortest in Africa. Unemployment stands at 87 percent and tuberculosis is spreading out of control. Corruption, brazen and ubiquitous, is a cancer on the economy.}}

    Synonyms

    * (disease) growth, malignancy, neoplasia * (something which spreads) lichen

    Hyponyms

    * tumor * leukaemia, leukemia

    Derived terms

    (types of cancer) * bowel cancer * breast cancer * colon cancer * leukemia * testicular cancer * lung cancer * prostate cancer * ovarian cancer * skin cancer * cervical cancer

    Related terms

    * Cancer * cancerization * cancerize * cancerous * canker * precancerous

    See also

    * malignant

    Anagrams

    * ----

    scab

    English

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • An incrustation over a sore, wound, vesicle, or pustule, formed during healing.
  • (colloquial, or, obsolete) The scabies.
  • The mange, especially when it appears on sheep.
  • * 1882 , James Edwin Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England , Volume 4, p. 306,
    • Scab was the terror of the sheep farmer, and the peril of his calling.
  • Any of several different diseases of potatoes producing pits and other damage on their surface, caused by streptomyces bacteria (but formerly believed to be caused by a fungus).
  • Common scab, a relatively harmless variety of scab (potato disease) caused by .
  • (botany) Any one of various more or less destructive fungal diseases that attack cultivated plants, forming dark-colored crustlike spots.
  • (founding) A slight irregular protuberance which defaces the surface of a casting, caused by the breaking away of a part of the mold.
  • A mean, dirty, paltry fellow.
    • (Shakespeare)
  • (slang) A worker who acts against trade union policies, especially a strikebreaker.

    • Synonyms

    * (strikebreaker) blackleg, knobstick, scalie

    Related terms

    * scabies * scabrous

    Verb

  • To become covered by a scab or scabs.
  • To form into scabs and be shed, as damaged or diseased skin.
  • * 1734 , Royal Society of London, The Philosophical Transactions (1719 - 1733) Abridged , Volume 7, page 631,
    • Tho?e Pu?tules aro?e, maturated, and ?cabbed off, intirely like the true Pox.
  • * 2009 , Linda Wisdom, Wicked By Any Other Name , page 233,
    • Trev walked over and leaned down, dropping a tender kiss on her forehead where the skin was raw and scabbing from the cut.
  • * 2009 , Nancy Lord, Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life , page 121,
    • The bark that wasn?t already scabbed off was peppered with beetle holes.
  • To remove part of a surface (from).
  • * 1891 , Canadian Senate, Select Committee on Railways, Telegraphs and Harbours: Proceedings and Evidence , page 265,
    • The beds shall be scabbed' off to give a solid bearing, no pinning shall be admitted between the backing and the face stones and there shall be a good square joint not exceeding one inch in width, and the face stone shall be ' scabbed off to allow this.
  • To act as a strikebreaker.
  • (transitive, UK, Australia, NZ, informal) To beg (for), to cadge or bum.
    • I scabbed some money off a friend.
  • * 2004 , Niven Govinden, We are the New Romantics , Bloomsbury Publishing, UK, page 143,
    • Finding a spot in a covered seating area that was more bus shelter than tourist-friendly, I unravelled a mother of a joint I?d scabbed off the garçon.
  • * 2006 , Linda Jaivin, The Infernal Optimist , 2010, HarperCollins Australia, unnumbered page,
    • I?d already used up me mobile credit. I was using a normal phone card, what I got from Hamid, what got it from a church lady what helped the refugees. I didn?t like scabbing from the asylums, but they did get a lotta phone cards.
  • * 2010 , Fiona Wood, Six Impossible Things , page 113,
    • I?ve told Fred we can see a movie this weekend, but that just seems like a money-wasting activity. And I can?t keep scabbing off my best friend.

    Anagrams

    *