Jun 16 2010
They look alike, but have different meanings – Part 3
- Contagious VS Infectious
Even when they don’t refer to medical language, these two words have quite different meanings. Contagious refers to how fast something can spread, while infectious means the irresistible quality of something.
Writing tip: use contagious to refer to unpleasant things.
- Predominant VS Predominate
These two words are often confonded in adverb forms, i.e. predominantly and predominately. However, predominant is an adjective and predominate is a verb.
Writing tip: use a mnemonic device to avoid confusing them:
The word ant is not a verb, but the word ate is. So if ate works in your sentence, you should write predominate.
- Foreword VS forward
A foreword (some people also mispell it foreward) refers to the first pages of a book; its synonym could be preface.
Forward is not a noun, but can be a verb, an averb or an adjective, e.g. “He moved forward“, “I forwarded him this e-mail“, etc.
