Horrible vs Sensible - What's the difference?
horrible | sensible |
A thing that causes horror; a terrifying thing, particularly a prospective bad consequence asserted as likely to result from an act.
* 1851 , Herman Melville, Moby Dick
* 1982 , United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, The Genocide Convention: Hearing Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate
* 1991 , Alastair Scott, Tracks Across Alaska: A Dog Sled Journey
* 2000 , John Dean,
* 2001 , Neil K. Komesar, Law's Limits: The Rule of Law and the Supply and Demand of Rights
A person wearing a comic or grotesque costume in a parade of horribles.
Causing horror; terrible; shocking.
*
*: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.
*, comment=The New Yorker, March 19
, passage=Strangers fainted dead away at the sight of the Laughing Man's horrible face. Acquaintances shunned him.}}
*, author=(Ray Bradbury)
, passage=Some of us have had plastic surgery on our faces and fingerprints. Right now we have a horrible job; we're waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end.}}
Tremendously wrong or errant.
*{{quote-book, year=1933, title=(My Life and Hard Times), author=(James Thurber)
, passage=Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.}}
Perceptible by the senses.
* Arbuthnot
* 1778 , William Lewis, The New Dispensatory (page 91)
* 1902 , William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience , Folio Society 2008, page 45:
Easily perceived; appreciable.
* Sir W. Temple
* Adam Smith
(archaic) Able to feel or perceive.
* Shakespeare
(archaic) Liable to external impression; easily affected; sensitive.
* Shakespeare
Of or pertaining to the senses; sensory.
(archaic) Cognizant; having the perception of something; aware of something.
* John Locke
* Addison
Acting with or showing good sense; able to make good judgements based on reason.
* 2005 , .
Characterized more by usefulness or practicality than by fashionableness, especially of clothing.
* 1999 , Neil Gaiman, Stardust (2001 Perennial Edition), page 8,
(obsolete) Sensation; sensibility.
* Milton
(obsolete) That which impresses itself on the senses; anything perceptible.
* Krauth-Fleming
(obsolete) That which has sensibility; a sensitive being.
* Burton
As nouns the difference between horrible and sensible
is that horrible is a thing that causes horror; a terrifying thing, particularly a prospective bad consequence asserted as likely to result from an act while sensible is (obsolete) sensation; sensibility.As adjectives the difference between horrible and sensible
is that horrible is causing horror; terrible; shocking while sensible is perceptible by the senses.horrible
English
Noun
(en noun)- Here's a carcase. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your horribles !
- A lot of the possible horribles conjured up by the people objecting to this convention ignore the plain language of this treaty.
- The pot had previously simmered skate wings, cods' heads, whales, pigs' hearts and a long litany of other horribles .
CNN interview, January 21, 2000:
- I'm trying to convince him that the criminal behavior that's going on at the White House has to end. And I give him one horrible after the next. I just keep raising them. He sort of swats them away.
- Many scholars have demonstrated these horribles and contemplated significant limitations on class actions.
Adjective
(en-adj)Synonyms
* See alsoReferences
sensible
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- Air is sensible to the touch by its motion.
- The sensible qualities of argentina promise no great virtue of this kind; for to the taste it discovers only a slight roughishness, from whence it may be presumed to be entitled to a place only among the milder corroborants.
- It has been vouchsafed, for example, to very few Christian believers to have had a sensible vision of their Saviour.
- The disgrace was more sensible than the pain.
- The discovery of the mines of America does not seem to have had any very sensible effect upon the prices of things in England.
- Would your cambric were sensible as your finger.
- a sensible thermometer
- with affection wondrous sensible
- He cannot think at any time, waking or sleeping, without being sensible of it.
- They are now sensible it would have been better to comply than to refuse.
- They ask questions of someone who thinks he's got something sensible to say on some matter when actually he hasn't.
- They would walk, on fair evenings, around the village, and discuss the theory of crop rotation, and the weather, and other such sensible matters.
Usage notes
* "Sensible" describes the reasonable way in which a person may think'' about things or ''do things: *: It wouldn't be sensible to start all over again now. * "Sensitive" describes an emotional way in which a person may react to things: *: He has always been a sensitive child. *: I didn’t realize she was so sensitive about her work.Noun
(en noun)- Our temper changed which must needs remove the sensible of pain.
- Aristotle distinguished sensibles into common and proper.
- This melancholy extends itself not to men only, but even to vegetals and sensibles .