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What is "distinguish"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
distinguish
verb
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a distinguished guest (=one who has done something that people respect or admire)
▪ Many distinguished guests were invited to the opening ceremony.
a distinguished/brilliant career (=very successful)
▪ She retired last year after a distinguished career as a barrister.
a distinguishing feature (=one that makes something different from others of the same type)
▪ A long beak is one of the bird’s distinguishing features.
a distinguishing/distinctive characteristic (=separating someone or something from others of the same type)
▪ The blue feathers are the distinguishing characteristic of the male bird.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
between
▪ More and more consultants were distinguishing between performance-only versus performance-and-change assignments.
▪ You had to go by their strut to distinguish between who should be approached and who avoided.
▪ Toward the end of Period 1, an infant begins to distinguish between objects, a behavior not present at birth.
clearly
▪ Nor did he distinguish clearly between practices in solo and tutti sections.
▪ Why does it exist? 5 Distinguish clearly between the benefits-received and the ability-to-pay principles of taxation.
▪ As soon as Possible we will paint this area of the playground so that it can be clearly distinguished by everyone.
▪ A retailer is required to distinguish clearly between the two in labelling and display.
▪ He also distinguishes clearly between criteria which qualify a firm's products to be considered and those which actually win the order.
▪ We can not, for instance, distinguish clearly between Na-O and Si-0 pairs, or Na-O and Ca-O pairs.
▪ He made his design choreographically viable by distinguishing clearly between the two styles he was using.
▪ Clearly distinguish between primary and secondary sources, and between the different types of history books.
most
▪ Her former husband is Britain's most distinguished amateur huntsman and Master of the Duke of Beafort's foxhounds.
▪ Today Loretta Barrett Books is one of the most distinguished literary agencies in the business.
▪ The performances too are most distinguished.
■ NOUN
ability
▪ And one of the distinctive features of life here has been a gradual loss of the ability to distinguish right from wrong.
▪ Some species of birds have developed the ability to distinguish between model and mimic and will feed on the imposters.
▪ Prioritising - the ability to distinguish between, for example, the urgent and the merely important. 3.
▪ The ability to distinguish between structure and detail, essential and inessential is a function of one's knowledge of a subject.
▪ They act on him and impair his ability to distinguish between thought and perception, between concepts and objects.
▪ Equally important for understanding of religion is the ability to distinguish between what is peripheral and what is central.
characteristic
▪ Both characteristics were to distinguish his rule over the next forty years.
▪ There were four main characteristics which distinguished the early retired from other older people.
class
▪ Firstly, the distinction between manual and non-manual work is not seen by some as an adequate way of distinguishing between classes.
▪ The most fundamental value that distinguishes classes differs for different class theorists.
▪ Marx distinguished two classes, bourgeois and proletarian, based on the ownership of the means of production.
▪ The buildings, playing fields, 75 monuments, benches, even trees honor Naval heroes and distinguished classes of midshipmen.
▪ At the moment, the law does not distinguish between different classes of director.
▪ Wealth during industrialisation was no longer adequate as a distinguishing feature of social class.
▪ Thus, we can see that we can distinguish three main classes in contemporary capitalist society.
▪ In this way, Portes distinguishes five social classes.
difficulty
▪ The difficulty in distinguishing between hypotheses was not surprising since only 209 families with Crohn's disease were available for analysis.
▪ He had difficulty distinguishing the real from the imagined.
▪ One reason for this reluctance to take action against the process of monopolization is the difficulty of distinguishing acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.
feature
▪ Salt ways present no special features that distinguish them from other roads and lanes on the map or on the ground.
▪ One of the features that distinguishes the United States from other countries is the extent to which teenagers work.
▪ Moral ambivalence is probably associated with a number of other features which distinguish regulatory misconduct from breaches of the traditional code.
▪ What features distinguish democracies or dictatorships?
form
▪ However, it is not simply the type of service or resource which distinguishes one form of prevention from another.
▪ He would distinguish the various forms in which meaning may be actualised from the underlying structures on which meaning rests.
▪ We must distinguish between weak forms and contracted forms.
▪ The second distinguishes crudely between legal form and intention.
▪ But even functional psychosis can vary in symptomatology and psychiatrists generally distinguish between two main forms.
group
▪ We jointly hosted an informal Sunday lunch for a distinguished group of actors on their day off.
▪ I know, of course, that distinguished individuals, even groups, in the homosexual community have claimed kinship with him.
▪ There are some characteristics that are helpful in distinguishing a mere group from a team.
▪ Types of Interest Groups To this point, we have not distinguished among political interest groups.
▪ It is not, of course, mere coverage of pension schemes that distinguishes manual from non-manual groups.
▪ A distinguished group of authors is slated for the seventh annual Women Writers Event.
▪ The database has extensive disaggregation by country, distinguishes fourteen commodity groups and covers a twenty year span of data.
▪ In less distinguished groups, the leader would have a fair amount of managing to do.
kind
▪ It is vital therefore to distinguish between the two kinds of breach of covenant.
▪ As he got older, spoke more and was spoken to more, he began to distinguish two kinds of people.
▪ However, Marxists distinguish two kinds of dissenting consciousness which can be fostered amongst workers by personal experience and by collective organization.
▪ We can distinguish between two kinds of rationale or emphasis in general degree courses: the general and the generic.
▪ One might distinguish three kinds of policy areas in which a country either is or is not sovereign.
▪ Hutcheson distinguishes two kinds of beauty, absolute and relative.
▪ Now, one can distinguish two kinds of schematic knowledge.
▪ The student learns to recognise and distinguish between different kinds of events and responds to them appropriately.
others
▪ This indicator must be a characteristic that is easily identifiable, and which clearly distinguishes working-class students from others.
▪ This will help distinguish your message from others, and in the process will interest the reader.
▪ At first infants can not distinguish between themselves and others.
▪ Then agents have a hard time distinguishing illegal aliens from others, he said.
type
▪ But we need to distinguish it from another type.
▪ But we need to distinguish between two types of tribal members.
▪ In principle, correspondence- and interpretation-computations together can distinguish between the three types of perception in question.
▪ In the last few years, nutritionists have begun to distinguish between two types of protein - animal and plant.
▪ The idea of a crossroads is a difficult concept to pin down because we have to distinguish between different types of changes.
▪ It is important to distinguish three types of merger.
▪ Nowadays it is important to distinguish between two main types of online information: historical and real time.
word
▪ Whenever he drifts toward sleep he feels close to distinguishing the words.
▪ Tone languages use tone to distinguish words from each other.
▪ However, the grammar must be able to correctly distinguish word hypotheses or the number of paths will grow exponentially.
▪ He could not distinguish her words but she sounded harassed and tense.
■ VERB
fail
▪ They fail to distinguish between wealth used to finance production and wealth used to finance consumption.
▪ Frequently, urban employment rates fail to distinguish between those living and working in the cities and those commuting in.
▪ Treating this tragedy as a law and order matter misses the point, because it fails to distinguish between symptom and cause.
▪ Otherwise you may obscure the development of your essay by failing to distinguish its overall direction.
▪ The problem of tracing the invention of enamel is made more difficult by failing to distinguish it more certainly from glass.
help
▪ Initiative members argue an ACE/Intel machine would have helped Intel distinguish itself from the cloners nipping most furiously at its heels.
▪ This will help distinguish your message from others, and in the process will interest the reader.
▪ Use the check card to help you distinguish between pattern and background rows.
▪ Naturally, we turn to medical experts to help us distinguish between a cold and the flu or another ailment.
▪ All of this should also help social workers to distinguish the important from the trivial.
▪ Child care research should help practitioners distinguish what is grave and enduring from the less serious and transient.
▪ The last chapter dealt with one type of connectivity which helps to distinguish text from non-text, namely thematic and information structure.
learn
▪ We say that he discovers his identity as he learns to distinguish between his body and the rest of the world.
▪ The student learns to recognise and distinguish between different kinds of events and responds to them appropriately.
▪ The octopus, he discovered, could learn to distinguish such shapes and patterns and avoid those coupled with the unpleasant experience.
need
▪ However, it is clear that we still need to distinguish between different advantages which can be distributed unequally.
▪ But we need to distinguish between two types of tribal members.
▪ But we need to distinguish it from another type.
▪ However, you need to distinguish between the case of the single team versus many teams.
▪ Also, as we have noted, we sometimes need to distinguish speaker from source and addressee from target.
▪ We need some way to distinguish such events from the crises that mark structural changes.
▪ To answer this question you need to distinguish between status that is earned and that which is not.
▪ In trying to sum up what this Green Movement is you need to distinguish between two important polarities, or tendencies.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ A tiny baby soon learns to distinguish its mother's face from other adults' faces.
▪ Even a expert would find it hard to distinguish between the original painting and the copy.
▪ I couldn't distinguish the words, but his tone was clear.
▪ It was just possible to distinguish the darkened village below.
▪ Several thousand minerals can be distinguished, each defined by its own set of properties.
▪ There's not a lot that distinguishes her from the other candidates.
▪ What distinguishes this approach from previous attempts to deal with HIV?
▪ What really distinguishes the proposal?
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ From that time onwards there was reason still, but not so much reason, to distinguish between trusts and legacies.
▪ I shall not attempt to distinguish the particular sources of individual ideas.
▪ The difficulty in distinguishing between hypotheses was not surprising since only 209 families with Crohn's disease were available for analysis.
▪ The trick in improving quality was to distinguish between variation due to random causes and that due to specific or assignable causes.
▪ They had to distinguish between problems because of a lack of ability from those of a lack of motivation.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Distinguish

Distinguish \Dis*tin"guish\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Distinguished; p. pr. & vb. n. Distinguishing.] [F. distinguer, L. distinguere, distinctum; di- = dis- + stinguere to quench, extinguish; prob. orig., to prick, and so akin to G. stechen, E. stick, and perh. sting. Cf. Extinguish.]

  1. Not set apart from others by visible marks; to make distinctive or discernible by exhibiting differences; to mark off by some characteristic.

    Not more distinguished by her purple vest, Than by the charming features of her face.
    --Dryden.

    Milton has distinguished the sweetbrier and the eglantine.
    --Nares.

  2. To separate by definition of terms or logical division of a subject with regard to difference; as, to distinguish sounds into high and low.

    Moses distinguished the causes of the flood into those that belong to the heavens, and those that belong to the earth.
    --T. Burnet.

  3. To recognize or discern by marks, signs, or characteristic quality or qualities; to know and discriminate (anything) from other things with which it might be confounded; as, to distinguish the sound of a drum.

    We are enabled to distinguish good from evil, as well as truth from falsehood.
    --Watts.

    Nor more can you distinguish of a man, Than of his outward show.
    --Shak.

  4. To constitute a difference; to make to differ.

    Who distinguisheth thee?
    --1 Cor. iv. 7. (Douay version).

  5. To separate from others by a mark of honor; to make eminent or known; to confer distinction upon; -- with by or for.``To distinguish themselves by means never tried before.''
    --Johnson.

    Syn: To mark; discriminate; differentiate; characterize; discern; perceive; signalize; honor; glorify.

Distinguish

Distinguish \Dis*tin"guish\, v. i.

  1. To make distinctions; to perceive the difference; to exercise discrimination; -- with between; as, a judge distinguishes between cases apparently similar, but differing in principle.

  2. To become distinguished or distinctive; to make one's self or itself discernible. [R.]

    The little embryo . . . first distinguishes into a little knot.
    --Jer. Taylor.

Related phrases:
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
distinguish

1560s, from Middle French distinguiss-, stem of distinguer, or directly from Latin distinguere "to separate between, keep separate, mark off, distinguish," perhaps literally "separate by pricking," from dis- "apart" (see dis-) + -stinguere "to prick" (compare extinguish and Latin instinguere "to incite, impel").\n

\nWatkins says "semantic transmission obscure;" the sense might be from "pricking out" as the old way to make punctuation in parchment or some literal image, but de Vaan derives the second element from a different PIE root meaning "to push, thrust."\n\nThe meanings of ex- and restinguere 'to extinguish' and distinguere seem quite distinct, but can be understood if the root meant 'to press' or 'push': ex-stinguere 'to put a fire out', re-stinguere 'to push back, suppress', and dis-stinguere 'to push apart [thence] distinguish, mark off ...."\n \nThe suffix -ish is due to the influence of many verbs in which it is the equivalent of Old French -iss-, ultimately from Latin inchoative suffix -iscere (this is also the case in extinguish, admonish, and astonish). Related: Distinguishing. The earlier form of the verb was distinguen (mid-14c.).

Wiktionary
distinguish

vb. To see someone or something as different from others.

WordNet
distinguish

  1. v. mark as different; "We distinguish several kinds of maple" [syn: separate, differentiate, secern, secernate, severalize, severalise, tell, tell apart]

  2. detect with the senses; "The fleeing convicts were picked out of the darkness by the watchful prison guards"; "I can't make out the faces in this photograph" [syn: recognize, recognise, discern, pick out, make out, tell apart]

  3. be a distinctive feature, attribute, or trait; sometimes in a very positive sense; "His modesty distinguishes him form his peers" [syn: mark, differentiate]

  4. make conspicuous or noteworthy [syn: signalize, signalise]

  5. identify as in botany or biology, for example [syn: identify, discover, key, key out, describe, name]

Related phrases:

Usage examples of "distinguish".

Veda: among them his divine birth is that which is distinguished by the ligation of the zone and sacrificial cord, and in that birth the Gayatri is his mother, and the Acharya his father.

Although Delaura had sought the support of distinguished members of his own order and even of other communities, none had dared challenge the acta of the convent or contradict popular credulity.

It was in the courtrooms of Massachusetts and on the printed page, principally in the newspapers of Boston, that Adams had distinguished himself.

They lad read the same law, distinguished themselves at an early age in the same profession, though Jefferson had never relished the practice of law as Adams had, nor felt the financial need to keep at it.

Like Adams, he had distinguished himself in the law and in Congress, where the two men had gotten along well enough, if frequently at cross purposes on issues.

Of kings and presidents, Adams said he saw little to distinguish them from other men.

Lignaloes or agallochum, to be distinguished from the medicinal aloes.

The American critic, altho he limited himself to the single art of literature, dealt with it at large, not distinguishing between the poets and the masters of prose.

The distinguishing characteristic of all ammonites was the complex suture pattern formed by the meeting of the growth chamber walls with the outside shell.

Indeed, it is only after considerable time that we realise that this man speaking with the enthusiasm of a black magician is discussing the ability of Andrias to perceive colours and his ability to distinguish various shades.

This last was an antient name, by which, according to Stephanus, the islands Rhodes, Cythnus, Besbicus, Tenos, and the whole continent of Africa, were distinguished.

The principal commanders, distinguished by the ensigns of their rank, appeared on horseback on either side of the Imperial throne.

Another distinguished Arabian Christian physician was Serapion the elder.

His successor in prestige, though not his serious rival, was Ali Ben el-Abbas, usually spoken of in medical literature as Ali Abbas, a distinguished Arabian physician who died near the end of the tenth century.

Of the prose writers of the Augustan age the most distinguished was the historian TITUS LIVIUS, usually called LIVY.