difference
noun
Simple meaning
The way in which two or more things are not alike
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
diferuhnsSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈdɪfɚəns
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
countableuncountable
Significant change in or effect on a situation or state.
“The difference in her is amazing.”
uncountable
The quality of being different.
countable
A characteristic of something that makes it different from something else.
A disagreement or argument about something important
The number that remains after subtraction; the number that when added to the subtrahend gives the minuend
countable
The result of a subtraction; sometimes the absolute value of this result.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- A2 · Elementary
- Frequency
- Very Common
- Typical Use
- Everyday English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: The quality of being unlike or dissimilar
Used this way, difference is a common word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
“There are many differences between jazz and rock.”
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use difference
- “The difference in her is amazing.”noun
- “There are many differences between jazz and rock.”noun
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
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Similar Words, What’s the Difference?
Close in meaning, but not always interchangeable.
The state or degree of being divergent: of diverging.
The state or result of having deviated.
The desertion by a party to any pleading of the ground taken by him in his last antecedent pleading, and the adoption….
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
The smallest change in stimulation that a person can detect.
The smallest change in stimulation that a person can detect.
A disagreement or argument about something important.
The difference between two stimuli that (under properly controlled experimental conditions) is detected as often as it is undetected.
The difference in electrical charge between two points in a circuit expressed in volts.
The most commonly used method of computing a correlation coefficient between the ranks of scores on two variables.
Related words
Connected by subject or meaning, not by word formation.
The branch of psychology that studies measurable differences between individuals.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.