What's the difference between
and
Enter two words to compare and contrast their definitions, origins, and synonyms to better understand how those words are related.

Sort vs Quality - What's the difference?

sort | quality | Related terms |

Sort is a related term of quality.


As nouns the difference between sort and quality

is that sort is kind, type, sort or sort can be fate, destiny, chance while quality is (uncountable) level of excellence.

As an adjective quality is

being of good worth, well made, fit for purpose.

sort

English

Etymology 1

From (etyl) (m), (m), (m) (= Dutch (m), German (m), Danish (m), Swedish (m)), from (etyl) .

Noun

(en noun)
  • A general type.
  • *, chapter=1
    • , title= Mr. Pratt's Patients, chapter=1 , passage=I stumbled along through the young pines and huckleberry bushes. Pretty soon I struck into a sort of path that, I cal'lated, might lead to the road I was hunting for. It twisted and turned, and, the first thing I knew, made a sudden bend around a bunch of bayberry scrub and opened out into a big clear space like a lawn.}}
  • *{{quote-book, year=1922, author=(Ben Travers), title=(A Cuckoo in the Nest)
    • , chapter=1 citation , passage=“[…] the awfully hearty sort of Christmas cards that people do send to other people that they don't know at all well. You know. The kind that have mottoes like
      Here's rattling good luck and roaring good cheer, / With lashings of food and great hogsheads of beer.
  • *{{quote-book, year=1963, author=(Margery Allingham), title=(The China Governess)
    • , chapter=17 citation , passage=The face which emerged was not reassuring.
  • *{{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-14, author= Sam Leith
    • , volume=189, issue=1, page=37, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Where the profound meets the profane , passage=Swearing doesn't just mean what we now understand by "dirty words". It is entwined, in social and linguistic history, with the other sort of swearing: vows and oaths.}}
  • Manner; form of being or acting.
  • *(Edmund Spenser) (c.1552–1599)
  • *:Which for my part I covet to perform, / In sort as through the world I did proclaim.
  • *(Richard Hooker) (1554-1600)
  • *:Flowers, in such sort worn, can neither be smelt nor seen well by those that wear them.
  • *(William Shakespeare) (c.1564–1616)
  • *:I'll deceive you in another sort .
  • *(John Milton) (1608-1674)
  • *:To Adam in what sort / Shall I appear?
  • *(John Dryden) (1631-1700)
  • *:I shall not be wholly without praise, if in some sort I have copied his style.
  • *
  • *:Carried somehow, somewhither, for some reason, on these surging floods, were these travelers, of errand not wholly obvious to their fellows, yet of such sort as to call into query alike the nature of their errand and their own relations. It is easily earned repetition to state that Josephine St. Auban's was a presence not to be concealed.
  • (lb) Condition above the vulgar; rank.
  • :(Shakespeare)
  • (lb) Group, company.
  • *(Edmund Spenser) (c.1552–1599)
  • *:a sort of shepherds
  • *(John Dryden) (1631-1700)
  • *:a sort of doves
  • *(Philip Massinger) (1583-1640)
  • *:a sort of rogues
  • *(George Chapman) (1559-1634)
  • *:A boy, a child, and we a sort of us, / Vowed against his voyage.
  • (lb) A person.
  • :
  • An act of sorting.
  • :
  • (lb) An algorithm for sorting a list of items into a particular sequence.
  • :
  • (lb) A piece of metal type used to print one letter, character, or symbol in a particular size and style.
  • (lb) Chance; lot; destiny.
  • *(William Shakespeare)
  • *:Let blockish Ajax draw / The sort to fight with Hector.
  • (lb) A pair; a set; a suit.
  • :(Johnson)
    • Quotations
    * (English Citations of "sort")
    Synonyms
    * (type) genre, genus, kind, type, variety * (person) character, individual, person, type * (act of sorting) sort-out * (in computing) sort algorithm, sorting algorithm * (typography) glyph, type * See also
    Derived terms
    * all sorts * allsorts * in sort * out of sorts * sort of * sort out * sorta * bead sort * binary tree sort * blort sort * bogo-sort * bozo sort * bubble sort * bucket sort * cocktail sort * comb sort * counting sort * distribution sort * drunk man sort * gnome sort * heapsort * insertion sort * in-place sort * insertion sort * introsort * introspective sort * library sort * merge sort * mergesort * monkey sort * pigeonhole sort * quicksort * radix sort * selection sort * shell sort * smoothsort * stochastic sort * stupid sort * stooge sort * timsort

    Etymology 2

    From (etyl)

    Verb

    (en verb)
  • (senseid)To separate according to certain criteria.
  • * Isaac Newton
    • Rays which differ in refrangibility may be parted and sorted from one another.
  • (senseid)To arrange into some order, especially numerically, alphabetically or chronologically.
  • (senseid)(British) To fix a problem, to handle a task; to sort out.
  • To conjoin; to put together in distribution; to class.
  • * Francis Bacon
    • Shellfish have been, by some of the ancients, compared and sorted with insects.
  • * Sir J. Davies
    • She sorts things present with things past.
  • To join or associate with others, especially with others of the same kind or species; to agree.
  • * Woodward
    • Nor do metals only sort and herd with metals in the earth, and minerals with minerals.
  • * Francis Bacon
    • The illiberality of parents towards children makes them base, and sort with any company.
  • To suit; to fit; to be in accord; to harmonize.
  • * Francis Bacon
    • They are happy whose natures sort with their vocations.
  • * Sir Walter Scott
    • I cannot tell ye precisely how they sorted .
  • (obsolete) To conform; to adapt; to accommodate.
  • * Shakespeare
    • I pray thee, sort thy heart to patience.
  • (obsolete) To choose from a number; to select; to cull.
  • * Chapman
    • that he may sort out a worthy spouse
  • * Shakespeare
    • I'll sort some other time to visit you.
    Usage notes
    In British sense “to fix a problem”, often used in the form “I’ll get you sorted,” or “Now that’s sorted,” – in American usage (sort out) is used instead.
    Synonyms
    * (separate according to certain criteria) categorise/categorize, class, classify, group * (arrange into some sort of order) order, rank
    Derived terms
    * sorted * sorting * sort out

    Statistics

    *

    Anagrams

    * ----

    quality

    English

    Noun

  • (uncountable) Level of excellence
    • This school is well-known for having teachers of high quality .
    Quality of life is usually determined by health, education, and income.
  • *
  • (countable) A property or an attribute that differentiates a thing or person.
    • One of the qualities of pure iron is that it does not rust easily.
    While being impulsive can be great for artists, it is not a desirable quality for engineers.
    Security, stability, and efficiency are good qualities of an operating system.
  • *
  • (archaic) High social position. (See also the quality.)
    • A peasant is not allowed to fall in love with a lady of quality .
    Membership of this golf club is limited to those of quality and wealth.
  • (uncountable) The degree to which a man-made object or system is free from bugs and flaws, as opposed to scope of functions or quantity of items.
  • (thermodynamics) In a two-phase liquid–vapor mixture, the ratio of the mass of vapor present to the total mass of the mixture.
  • (emergency medicine, countable) The third step in OPQRST where the responder investigates what the NOI/MOI feels like.
    • To identify quality try asking, "what does it feel like?".

    Usage notes

    * Adjectives often applied to "quality": high, good, excellent, exceptional, great, outstanding, satisfactory, acceptable, sufficient, adequate, poor, low, bad, inferior, dubious, environmental, visual, optical, industrial, total, artistic, educational, physical, musical, chemical, spiritual, intellectual, architectural, mechanical.

    Synonyms

    * See also

    Coordinate terms

    * (a property that differentiates) quiddity

    Derived terms

    (quality) * human quality * industrial quality * quality time * quality of life * the quality, the Quality * total quality management * qualitative

    Related terms

    * qualify

    Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • Being of good worth, well made, fit for purpose.
    • We only sell quality products.
    That was a quality game by Jim Smith.
    A quality system ensures products meet customer requirements.
  • * Harriet (a Cambridge University student), quoted in John Ahier, John Beck, Rob Moore, Graduate Citizens?: Issues of Citizenship and Higher Education , Routledge (2003), ISBN 978-0-415-25722-0, page 114:
    • I mean a lot of the money that obviously goes into universities and their libraries and their facilities and their academics and stuff but I mean I haven’t had a very quality degree to be honest. I think the quality of my education has been crap . . .
  • * 2004 , Vance M. Thompson, MD, in J. Kevin Belville and Ronald J. Smith (editors), LASIK Techniques: Pearls and Pitfalls , SLACK Incorporated, ISBN 978-1-55642-622-3, page 187:
    • For one I wanted to have what I considered a very quality tracking device.
  • * 2008 , Carl Erskine, in Fay Vincent, We Would Have Played for Nothing: Baseball Stars of the 1950s and 1960s Talk About the Game They Loved , Simon and Schuster, ISBN 978-1-4165-5342-7, page 144:
    • A very quality ball club; that was the Braves.

    Derived terms

    * qualityness

    Related terms

    * qualia * qualitative

    External links

    * * *