Useful vs Apropos - What's the difference?
useful | apropos | Related terms |
Having a practical or beneficial use.
* {{quote-magazine, year=2013, month=July-August, author=
, title= '', ''useful for '' and ''useful to ''. The words ''useful to'' are also found in construction such as ''It is useful to do'', in which ''to marks an infinitive rather than being a preposition.
Of an appropriate or pertinent nature.
* 1877 , ,
by the way, incidental.
* 1877 ,
Regarding or concerning.
* 2011 , Jeremy Harding, "Diary", London Review of Books , 33.VII:
By the way.
Timely; at a good time.
Useful is a related term of apropos.
As adjectives the difference between useful and apropos
is that useful is having a practical or beneficial use while apropos is .useful
English
Adjective
(en adjective)Lee S. Langston, magazine=(American Scientist)
The Adaptable Gas Turbine, passage=Turbines have been around for a long time—windmills and water wheels are early examples. The name comes from the Latin turbo'', meaning ''vortex , and thus the defining property of a turbine is that a fluid or gas turns the blades of a rotor, which is attached to a shaft that can perform useful work.}}
Usage notes
* Prepositions: useful'' is used in ''useful forSynonyms
* noteful * serviceable * utilitarianAntonyms
* unuseful * useless * harmfulapropos
English
Alternative forms
* *Adjective
(en adjective)- Nothing easier. I received not long ago a map from my friend, Augustus Petermann, at Leipzig. Nothing could be more apropos .
- Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. "No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin," he observed. "Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends' thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine."
Synonyms
* (by the way) by the way, incidentally, incidentalPreposition
(English prepositions)- Few have the same root and branch obsession with the recent past or the avenger’s recall (‘the necessity for long memory and sarcasm in argument’, as he wrote apropos the old left intelligentsia in New York).