different between earnest vs aggressive

English

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /??n?st/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /???n?st/
• Homophone: Ernest

Etymology 1

From Middle English ernest, eornest, from Old English eornest, eornost, eornust (“earnestness, zeal, seriousness, battle”), from Proto-Germanic *ernustuz (“earnest, strength, solidity, struggle, fight”), a derivative of Proto-Germanic *arniz (“efficient, capable, diligent, sure”), from Proto-Indo-European *er- (“to cause to move, arouse, increase”). Cognate with West Frisian earnst (“earnest, seriousness”), Dutch ernst (“seriousness, gravity, earnest”), German Ernst (“seriousness, earnestness, zeal, vigour”), Icelandic ern (“brisk, vigorous”), Gothic ???????????????????????? (arniba, “secure, certain, sure”).

The adjective is from Middle English eornest, from Old English eornoste (“earnest, zealous, serious”), from the noun. Cognate with North Frisian ernste (“earnest”), Middle Low German ernest, ernst (“serious, earnest”), German ernst (“serious, earnest”).

Noun

earnest (uncountable)

1. Gravity; serious purpose; earnestness.
   • 1914, February 13, The Times, Obituary: Canon Augustus Jessopp

     He wrote well in a forcible, colloquial style, with the air of being tremendously in earnest, and full of knowledge which overflowed his pages, tricked out with somewhat boisterous illustrations.

   • c. 1575-a 1586, Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia

     Take heed that this jest do not one day turn to earnest.

   • c. 1592, William Shakespeare, Richard III: Act 5, Scene 1

     That high All-Seer which I dallied with

     Hath turn'd my feigned prayer on my head

     And given in earnest what I begg'd in jest.

2. Seriousness; reality; actuality (as opposed to joking or pretence)

Derived terms

• earnestful
• in earnest

Translations

Verb

earnest (third-person singular simple present earnests, present participle earnesting, simple past and past participle earnested)

1. (transitive) To be serious with; use in earnest.
   • 1602, Pastor Fido:

     Let's prove among ourselves our armes in jest, That when we come to earnest them with men, We may them better use.

Adjective

earnest (comparative earnester or more earnest, superlative earnestest or most earnest)

1. (said of an action or an utterance) Serious or honest
2. (with a positive sense) Focused in the pursuit of an objective; eager to obtain or do.

3. Intent; focused; showing a lot of concentration.

4. (said of a person or a person's character) Possessing or characterised by seriousness.

5. Strenuous; diligent.

6. Serious; weighty; of a serious, weighty, or important nature; important.

Derived terms

• earnestly
• earnestness
• in earnest

Translations

Etymology 2

Of uncertain origin; apparently related to erres. Compare also arles.

Noun

earnest (plural earnests)

1. A sum of money paid in advance as a deposit; hence, a pledge, a guarantee, an indication of something to come.

   • Now he that hath wrought us for the selfsame thing is God, who also hath given unto us the earnest of the Spirit.

   • 1990, Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game, Folio Society 2010, p. 365:

     But if all this was viewed by Gladstone and the Cabinet as an earnest of St Petersburg's future good intentions in Central Asia, then disillusionment was soon to follow.

Translations

See also

• Earnest
• earnest money

Etymology 3

earn +? -est

Verb

earnest

1. (archaic) second-person singular simple present form of earn

Anagrams

• Eastern, Saetern, Tareens, eastern, estrane, nearest, renates, sterane

English

Etymology

From aggress +? -ive. Compare with French agressif.

Pronunciation

• (US) IPA^(key): /?????s.?v/
• Rhymes: -?s?v

Adjective

aggressive (comparative more aggressive, superlative most aggressive)

1. Characterized by aggression; unjustly attacking; prone to behave in a way that involves attacking or arguing.

   an aggressive policy, war, person, nation

   • 2011, Judith S. Weis, Do Fish Sleep?, Rutgers University Press (?ISBN), page 63:

     When a new aggressive fish is added to an aquarium with an already-established, territorial fish, the established fish will probably fight to protect its territory (the whole tank).

2. (programming) Of heuristics, source code optimization techniques, etc.: exploiting every opportunity to be applied.
   • 1996, Tibor Gyimothy, Compiler Construction: 6th International Conference, CC '96, Linköping, Sweden, April 24 - 26, 1996. Proceedings, Volume 6, Springer ?ISBN, page 59

     This paper describes how aggressive loop unrolling is done in a retargetable optimizing compiler.

   • 2001, Paul Feautrier (edited by Santosh Pande and Dharma P. Agrawal), Compiler Optimizations for Scalable Parallel Systems, Springer ?ISBN, page 173

     Since the most aggressive type of optimization a program can be subjected to is parallelization, understanding a program before attempting to parallelize it is a very important step.

   • 2002, Y. N. Srikant, Priti Shankar, The Compiler Design Handbook: Optimizations and Machine Code Generation, CRC Press ?ISBN, page 465

     However, aggressive compiler techniques such as loop unrolling, promoting of subscripted array variables into registers (especially in of subscripted array variables into registers (especially in loops) and interprocedural optimizations create heavy register pressure and it is still quite important to do a good job of register allocation.

   • 2002, Shpeisman, T. ; Lueh, G.-Y. ; Adl-Tabatabai, A.-R., PACT 2002: 2002 International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques : proceedings : 22-25 September, 2002, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, IEEE Computer Society Press ?ISBN, page 249

     The Itanium processor is an example of an Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) architecture and thus relies on aggressive and expensive compiler optimizations for performance.

   • 2003, Susanna Pelagatti (edited by Fethi Rabhi and Sergei Gorlatch), Patterns and Skeletons for Parallel and Distributed Computing, Springer ?ISBN, page 182

     This sensibly eases the programmer task and allows for more aggressive optimisations of the global program structure.

   • 2011, Wen-mei W. Hwu, GPU Computing Gems Jade Edition, Elsevier ?ISBN, page 11

     The CUDA C code for the GPU, as well as the C and inline assembly code for the CPU, were highly optimized and aggressive compiler optimizations (-O4) were turned on.

3. (pathology, of a tumour or disease) That spreads quickly or extensively; virulent; malignant.

Synonyms

• See also Thesaurus:combative

Antonyms

• passive

Derived terms

Related terms

Translations

Further reading

• aggressive in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• aggressive in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.

German

Adjective

aggressive

1. inflection of aggressiv:
   1. strong/mixed nominative/accusative feminine singular
   2. strong nominative/accusative plural
   3. weak nominative all-gender singular
   4. weak accusative feminine/neuter singular

Italian

Adjective

aggressive f pl

1. feminine plural of aggressivo

Norwegian Bokmål

Adjective

aggressive

1. definite singular of aggressiv
2. plural of aggressiv

Norwegian Nynorsk

Adjective

aggressive

1. definite singular of aggressiv
2. plural of aggressiv

Swedish

Adjective

aggressive

1. absolute definite natural masculine form of aggressiv.