✅ Dull is the perfect adjective for something that has lost its sharpness (a dull knife).

✅ Blunt is the perfect adjective for something that wasn’t sharp to start with (the blunt edge of a spoon).

✅ Blunt can also be used interchangeably with dull to describe things that have lost their sharpness through use (The axe became blunt/dull after chopping firewood).

⚠️ Be careful using these words to describe people, though. Dull is often used to describe people who are boring, but it can also be used to describe people who are judged as being unintelligent. Blunt describes people who have a straightforward or tactless way of speaking.

Show your sharp wit with these synonyms for blunt!

✅  Better and improve both mean to make something more satisfying or more desirable (Better your chances; improve your skills).

✅  Improve is typically used when you’re making something more satisfying by meeting a need (Conditions improved after we got the coffee machine).

✅  Better often means to increase the good qualities that something has. Improve implies a worse starting position than better (better your grades to all A’s; improve your grades from C’s to B’s).

✅  To improve yourself means to seek more education or knowledge, whereas to better yourself refers to getting a higher salary or advancing to a higher social class.

Improve your vocabulary with these synonyms for better.

✅  Complete is the best word to describe something with all its elements or parts (The set was complete).

✅  Intact is the best word to emphasize that something is in its original condition, including being complete, especially when it might be surprising or noteworthy to be that way (The parcel arrived intact; Even after all those years, her memory remained intact).

✅  Intact more often describes physical items. It’s better to use intact rather than complete when you want to emphasize that something physical has survived through difficult circumstances (The boat remained intact after the storm).

✅  Both intact and complete can refer to intangible things like arguments or explanations (Her reasoning was intact; His argument was complete). Complete can also imply that something has been finished (He gave a complete explanation of what happened).

Try using Grammar Coach to write a sentence describing an intact historical artifact.