Please give me some sentence samples using these synonyms. Thanks.
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‘Smart’ and ‘intelligent’ have the same meaning, but ‘smart’ is less formal; ‘smart’ also means ‘well-dressed’. ‘Clever’ is ‘mentally quick and resourceful’, but can also sometimes be used synonymously with the other two.
My son is smart/intelligent.
There may be intelligent life on Mars.
I ain’t so smart, no how.
Chimpanzees are intelligent animals.
Crows are clever/intelligent/smart birds.
Foxes are reputed to be clever.
I found a clever solution to our dilemma.
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Clever
Smart is an American term for clever. Standard English, smart means to be well-dressed or fomally dressed.
as in:
American: My, but you’re smart = Std. Eng: You are very clever!
Intelligent or intelligence are used in the same manner as clever/smart, but more formal.
The Compact Oxford English dictionary says nothing about “smart” being an American term for “clever”. It simply gives this definition without saying anything about it being American:
However, there is one usage of “smart” that the dictionary says is American:
So the claim that the use of “smart” for “clever” is American doesn’t stand up. If it were American usage only, the dictionary would say something.
We have a few relations living in the States and it seems as though they use smart more frequently, while we prefer to use clever. It really doesn’t matter, as both smart and clever mean the same thing anyway.
Yes, we do use “smart” more often than the British do, and we use “clever” less often. However, the word “smart” derives from a word in Old English, so it’s not an American invention. Its usage to mean “quick” or “clever” is first attested in 1303, so almost 200 years before Columbus.
It’s more than likely one of those words that the British planted on the American continent and then proceeded to use less. It’s the same thing with “fall” for “autumn”, which originated in Britain but fell out of use there.
eg: Stephen Hawking is a smart scientist.
Thanks for the info. I have a travelling word story about the word ‘kran’. My Polish husband noticed that kran means tap in both Polish and in Afrikaans (Dutch based language in South Africa) We discovered that the word comes from Mittelniederdeutsch from 14th/15th century.This word travelled thousands of km from Germany to Poland and then right to the bottom of Afrika and is still used today, but not in Germany (at least, not in Berlin)!
Try checking this: dict.cc/?s=Kran
There is a slight difference between smart and intelligent. In today’s usage, an intelligent person is usually someone who has a high level of knowledge on a broad base of subjects. A smart person is usually someone who is quick in thinking though not necessarily having high level knowledge in a broad base of subjects (e.g. Someone who is street smart may not necessarily be intelligent and an intelligent person may not necessarily be smart)
I think rather that ‘street smart’ is just an idiom. I stand by my original post on the subject three years ago.