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Sleuth vs Null - What's the difference?

sleuth | null |

As nouns the difference between sleuth and null

is that sleuth is an animal’s trail or track while null is a non-existent or empty value or set of values.

As verbs the difference between sleuth and null

is that sleuth is to act as a detective; to try to discover who committed a crime while null is to nullify; to annul.

As an adjective null is

having no validity, "null and void.

sleuth

English

Etymology 1

From (etyl) (Norwegian slo).

Noun

(en noun)
  • (obsolete) An animal’s trail or track.
  • (archaic) A sleuth-hound; a bloodhound.
  • A detective.
  • * 1908 , (Frank L. Baum), Aunt Jane’s Nieces at Millville
  • Do ye want me to become a sleuth , or engage detectives to track the objects of your erroneous philanthropy?
    Synonyms
    * (detective) detective

    Verb

    (en verb)
  • (transitive) To act as a detective; to try to discover who committed a crime.
  • * 1922 , , The Secret Adversary
  • We must discover where he lives, what he does — sleuth him, in fact!
    Synonyms
    * shadow

    Etymology 2

    From (etyl) , corresponding to (slow) + (-th).

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • (obsolete, uncountable) Slowness; laziness, sloth.
  • (rare) A collective term for a group of bears.
  • * 1961 , , A Passport Secretly Green , p.89
  • As quietly as if I were practicing to join a sleuth of bears , I crept out the door and went on home, eventually winding up in the garage…
  • * 1995 , , The Girl Sleuth , p.13
  • If these dainty adventurers weren’t being chased by a sleuth of bears or bogeys, they were being captured by Gypsies or thieves.
  • * 2007 , , The Lightkeepers’ Menagerie: Stories of Animals at Lighthouses , p.200
  • From the darkness came the howls of routs of wolves and bands of coyotes, the rumbling growls of a sleuth of bears or the bugles of a gang of elk.
    Synonyms
    * (sloth) idleness, inertia, laziness, lethargy, sloth, slothfulness * (collective term for a group of bears) sloth

    See also

    * sloth *

    null

    English

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • A non-existent or empty value or set of values.
  • Zero]] quantity of [[expression, expressions; nothing.
  • (Francis Bacon)
  • Something that has no force or meaning.
  • (computing) the ASCII or Unicode character (), represented by a zero value, that indicates no character and is sometimes used as a string terminator.
  • (computing) the attribute of an entity that has no valid value.
  • Since no date of birth was entered for the patient, his age is null .
  • One of the beads in nulled work.
  • (statistics) null hypothesis
  • Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • Having no validity, "null and void"
  • insignificant
  • * 1924 , Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove :
  • In proportion as we descend the social scale our snobbishness fastens on to mere nothings which are perhaps no more null than the distinctions observed by the aristocracy, but, being more obscure, more peculiar to the individual, take us more by surprise.
  • absent or non-existent
  • (mathematics) of the null set
  • (mathematics) of or comprising a value of precisely zero
  • (genetics, of a mutation) causing a complete loss of gene function, amorphic.
  • Derived terms

    * nullity

    Verb

    (en verb)
  • to nullify; to annul
  • (Milton)

    See also

    * nil ----