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Desperate vs Exasperate - What's the difference?

desperate | exasperate |

As adjectives the difference between desperate and exasperate

is that desperate is being filled with, or in a state of despair; hopeless while exasperate is exasperated; embittered.

As a verb exasperate is

to frustrate, vex, provoke, or annoy; to make angry.

desperate

English

Adjective

(en adjective)
  • Being filled with, or in a state of despair; hopeless.
  • * (William Shakespeare)
    • Since his exile she hath despised me most, / Forsworn my company and rail'd at me, / That I am desperate of obtaining her.
  • * , chapter=16
    • , title= The Mirror and the Lamp , passage=“[…] She takes the whole thing with desperate seriousness. But the others are all easy and jovial—thinking about the good fare that is soon to be eaten, about the hired fly, about anything.”}}
  • Without regard to danger or safety; reckless; furious.
  • * Macaulay
    • desperate expedients
  • Beyond hope; causing despair; extremely perilous; irretrievable.
  • Extreme, in a bad sense; outrageous.
  • * (William Shakespeare)
    • a desperate offendress against nature
  • * Macaulay
    • the most desperate of reprobates
  • Extremely intense.

    • Derived terms

    * desperation

    Related terms

    * despair * desperado

    Anagrams

    * ----

    exasperate

    English

    Verb

    (exasperat)
  • To frustrate, vex, provoke, or annoy; to make angry.
  • * , Macbeth , act 3, sc. 6:
    • this report
    Hath so exasperate the king that he
    Prepares for some attempt of war.
  • * 1851 , , Moby Dick , ch. 3:
    • The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.
  • * 1853 , , Bleak House , ch. 11:
    • Beadle goes into various shops and parlours, examining the inhabitants; always shutting the door first, and by exclusion, delay, and general idiotcy, exasperating the public.
  • * 1987 , " Woman of the Year: Corazon Aquino," Time , 5 Jan:
    • [S]he exasperates her security men by acting as if she were protected by some invisible shield.
  • * 2007 , " Loyal Mail," Times Online (UK), 4 June (retrieved 7 Oct 2010):
    • News that Adam Crozier, Royal Mail chief executive, is set to receive a bumper bonus will exasperate postal workers.

    Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • (obsolete) Exasperated; embittered.
    • (Shakespeare)
  • * Elizabeth Browning
    • Like swallows which the exasperate dying year / Sets spinning.

    See also

    * exacerbate ----