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Yekaterina
what's the difference between "entire" and "whole"?
hi, everyone
what's the difference between "entire" and "whole"?
I have saw their usage a lot of times but still can not understand the diffenence
"whole life" and "entire life" look the same. I often meet the word "entire" with nouns using to express time: entire hour, enire day etc. Is it using for periods of time?
4 mag 2017 16:39
Risposte · 4
They are synonyms.
"Whole" is the usual, everyday, spoken word.
"Entire" is more formal or literary. It might also be used for emphasis that you mean 100.0000%. "Entire" also has some specialized uses. In botany, for example, the edge of a leaf is either "serrated" (like a tiny sawtooth) or "entire" (smooth-edged).
It is the usual thing. I checked a dictionary and found what I expected. "whole" is derived from Middle English (and Anglo-Saxon), "entire" from Old French (and thus Latin). Because of the history of England, and its conquest by the French-speaking Normans in 1066, English has almost a double core vocabulary. There are many such pairs of near-synonyms, in which the Anglo-Saxon word is less formal and the French or Latin-derived word is more formal.
4 maggio 2017
I think they mean the same thing and are interchangeable. But maybe "entire" can maybe imply that it is something very big, for example "the whole pie" or "the entire country"
4 maggio 2017
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Yekaterina
Competenze linguistiche
Inglese, Russo
Lingua di apprendimento
Inglese
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