Intimate vs Insinuate - What's the difference?
intimate | insinuate |
Closely acquainted; familiar.
Of or involved in a sexual relationship.
Personal; private.
A very close friend.
(in plural intimates ) Women's underwear, sleepwear, or lingerie, especially offered for sale in a store.
To suggest or disclose discreetly.
* '>citation
(rare) To creep, wind, or flow into; to enter gently, slowly, or imperceptibly, as into crevices.
* Woodward
(figurative, by extension) To ingratiate; to obtain access to or introduce something by subtle, cunning or artful means.
* 1995 , , p. 242
* John Locke
* Dryden
* Clarendon
To hint; to suggest tacitly while avoiding a direct statement.
Insinuate is a synonym of intimate.
As verbs the difference between intimate and insinuate
is that intimate is to suggest or disclose discreetly while insinuate is to creep, wind, or flow into; to enter gently, slowly, or imperceptibly, as into crevices.As an adjective intimate
is closely acquainted; familiar.As a noun intimate
is a very close friend.intimate
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- an intimate friend
- He and his sister deeply valued their intimate relationship as they didn't have much else to live for.
- She enjoyed some intimate time alone with her husband.
- an intimate setting
Noun
(en noun)- Only a couple of intimates had ever read his writing.
- You'll find bras and panties in the women's intimates section upstairs.
Synonyms
* (close friend) bosom buddy, bosom friend, cater-cousinVerb
(intimat)- The Kaiser beamed. Von Bulow had praised him. Von Bulow had exalted him and humbled himself. The Kaiser could forgive anything after that. "Haven't I always told you," he exclaimed with enthusiasm, "that we complete one another famously? We should stick together, and we will!"
[...]
Von Bulow saved himself in time—but, canny diplomat that he was, he nevertheless had made one error: he should have begun by talking about his own shortcomings and Wilhelm's superiority—not by intimating that the Kaiser was a half-wit in need of a guardian.
- He intimated that we should leave before the argument escalated.
insinuate
English
Verb
- The water easily insinuates itself into, and placidly distends, the vessels of vegetables.
- Nanny didn't so much enter places as insinuate herself; she had unconsciously taken a natural talent for liking people and developed it into an occult science.
- All the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment.
- Horace laughs to shame all follies and insinuates virtue, rather by familiar examples than by the severity of precepts.
- He insinuated himself into the very good grace of the Duke of Buckingham.
- She insinuated that her friends had betrayed her.
