The difference between prospective and perspective is all in how you look at it. Prospective is used in the context of looking ahead to what might happen in the future. Perspective is used in the context of viewpoints or the position from which something is viewed. The difference can be confusing, especially since they sound so much alike. We’ll break down the difference in meaning, …
You’ve probably noticed that there’s a lot going on in the world right now, and you may have noticed people using words like concurrent and consecutive to describe these events. That’s fitting, because they’re used to describe things happening at the same time or one after another. It can be easy to forget exactly when each one should be used, so we’re here to help …
The words interpolation and extrapolation may sound super technical, but they’re actually not all that complicated. Each term is used slightly differently depending on whether it’s being used generally or in the context of math and data science. But we’ll help you sort all that out. In this article, we’ll discuss their more specific technical usage (hint: it tends to involve data sequences), cover the …
Ingress and egress look and sound like they’re opposites, and they are. They’re primarily used in the context of entrances and exits, especially in architecture and other fields related to planning how people get in and out of places. You can probably guess from the in in ingress that it generally means “the act of going in” or refers to an entryway. But there’s a …
Glass half full, or glass half empty? Looking on the bright side, or expecting the worst? Rose-colored glasses, or Murphy’s law? The words optimistic and pessimistic are opposites used in the context of people’s general outlooks or their sense of whether a situation will turn out positively or negatively. In this article, we’ll define both words—as well as the related nouns optimism, optimist, pessimism, and …
Welcome to the Trebuchet and Catapult Helpline. If a large projectile is currently hurtling toward you, move out of the way before reading any further. For all other inquiries, we’re glad to help. So, a large boulder has just been hurled at you with a medieval-looking contraption and, understandably, you want to know what it is. Or perhaps you find yourself desiring to fling an …
If you have a loan, especially a student loan or a mortgage, there may come a time when you aren’t able to keep up with your payments. But there are options when it comes to repayment relief, including one called a forbearance and one called a deferment. Both can involve temporarily postponing or pausing (or temporarily lowering) loan payments. But there can be a crucial …
You may be confused about the difference between maybe and may be. Or maybe you’re not. Either way, one space can make the difference between a verb meaning “might be” and an adverb meaning “possibly” or “perhaps.” In this article, we’ll break down why that space matters so much, and we’ll give you some examples to show exactly what the difference is, as well as …
We hear the words hallucination and delusion mentioned in discussions about mental health, lists of medication side effects, and in general conversation—sometimes interchangeably. In all three contexts, they involve perceiving things not based in reality. But is there a clinical difference in a medical context? Their meanings and differences are important, because hallucinations and delusions, like many other aspects of mental conditions, can carry strong …
Heterozygous and homozygous are terms used in biology and genetics to indicate whether a living thing has two of the same copies of a gene for a particular trait, or whether it has two different ones. For example, let’s say one parent has black hair, and one has brown hair. One of their children might get two copies of the black hair gene, while another …
What’s the difference between a fiddle and a violin, anyway? They seem to look exactly the same, so why the different names? Was the fiddler on the roof secretly a violinist? And what exactly was Nero playing? No fiddlin’ around—just answers to your burning questions about the fiddle and the violin. The words fiddle and violin are two names for the same stringed instrument—fiddle is …
An anion, pronounced [ an-ahy-uhn ], is a type of ion—an electrically charged atom or group of atoms. A cation is a type of ion for cats (OK, fine, that’s not true, but it is pronounced [ kat-ahy-uhn ] ). But seriously: anions and cations are both ions. The difference is in the electrical charge. Anions have a negative charge, and cations have a positive …
