Dazzle vs Overwhelm - What's the difference?
dazzle | overwhelm |
To confuse the sight of by means of excessive brightness.
* Milton
* Sir H. Taylor
(figuratively) To render incapable of thinking clearly; to overwhelm with showiness or brilliance.
To be overpowered by light; to be confused by excess of brightness.
* Francis Bacon
* Dryden
A light of dazzling brilliancy.
(uncommon) A herd of zebra.
* 1958', Laurens Van der Post, ''The lost world of the Kalahari: with the great and the little memory'' (' 1998 David Coulson edition):
* 2009 , Darren Paul Shearer, In You God Trusts , page 176:
* 2010 , Douglas Rogers, The Last Resort: A Memoir of Mischief and Mayhem on a Family Farm in Africa , page 22:
To engulf, surge over and submerge.
To overpower, crush.
* Bible, Psalms lxxviii. 53
To overpower emotionally.
To cause to surround, to cover.
As verbs the difference between dazzle and overwhelm
is that dazzle is to confuse the sight of by means of excessive brightness while overwhelm is to engulf, surge over and submerge.As a noun dazzle
is a light of dazzling brilliancy.dazzle
English
Verb
(dazzl)- Dazzled by the headlights of the lorry, the deer stopped in the middle of the street.
- Those heavenly shapes / Will dazzle now the earthly, with their blaze / Insufferably bright.
- An unreflected light did never yet / Dazzle the vision feminine.
- The delegates were dazzled by the originality of his arguments.
- An overlight maketh the eyes dazzle .
- I dare not trust these eyes; / They dance in mists, and dazzle with surprise.
Derived terms
* dazzler * dazzlementNoun
(s)- We were trying to stalk a dazzle of zebra which flashed in and out of a long strip of green and yellow fever trees, with an ostrich, its feathers flared like a ballet skirt around its dancing legs, on their flank, when suddenly
- Zebras move in herds which are known as "dazzles." When a lion approaches a dazzle of zebras during its hunt,
- I reached the lodge as a dazzle of zebras trotted across the dirt road into thorny scrub by the game fence, and a lone kudu gazed up at me from the short grass near the swimming pool.
Synonyms
* herdoverwhelm
English
Verb
- The dinghy was overwhelmed by the great wave.
- In December 1939 the Soviet Union attacked Finland with overwhelming force.
- The sea overwhelmed their enemies.
- He was overwhelmed with guilt.
- Joy overwhelmed her when she realized that she had won a million dollars.
- (Papin)