From New Oxford American:
dark horse |ˈdɑrk ˈˈhɔrs|
noun
1 a person about whom little is known, esp. someone whose abilities and potential for success are concealed : [as adj.] a dark-horse candidate.
2 a competitor or candidate who has little chance of winning, or who wins against expectations : a preseason dark horse as the nation's top collegiate football team.
sleeper |ˈslipər|
noun
3 a movie, book, play, etc., that achieves sudden unexpected success after initially attracting little attention, typically one that proves popular without much promotion or expenditure.
• an antique whose true value goes unrecognized for some time.
From Etymonline:
dark horse
in politics, 1842, an image from horse racing, in which dark is used in its figurative sense of "unknown."
Moonraker is called a "dark horse"; that is neither his sire nor dam is known. ["Pierce Egan's Book of Sports," London, 1832]
sleeper
[...] Sense of "something whose importance proves to be greater than expected" first attested 1892, originally in Amer.Eng,. sports jargon, probably from earlier gambling slang (1856) sense of "unexpected winning card."
Here's some generalizations gleaned from the above:
- dark horses are usually people; sleepers are usually things.
- dark horses are intentionally kept unknown; sleepers are simply not promoted.
- a dark horse might achieve success; a sleeper already has—surprisingly.
- dark horses' limelight often decrescendoes; sleepers' crescendoes.
As to your questions, I'd say they're not quite interchangeable. Knowing their different connotations will likely prove one to be the better word choice.
A dark horse might also be called an enigma, or simply an unknown; while surprise hit, cult classic, and box-office success are other phrases often applied to sleepers.
Blurry can always be replaced by blurred (except in the word blurry-eyed), but not always vice versa. IMO, blurry, for the most part, fits all three meanings of blurred in the OALD excerpt, not just the first.
However, blurred has another use which blurry doesn't duplicate, and the dictionary doesn't bring out (probably because it's hard to do without examples). When blurred follows is, was, etc., (i.e. the picture was blurred), it can take a modifier or modifier phrase (e.g. the picture was blurred by the rain or the picture was badly blurred). Blurry cannot be used nearly as extensively in this way.
To go into nuances, even in the places where blurry and blurred are interchangeable, blurred suggests a previous state of non-blurriness and may suggest a perpetrator, whereas blurry only reports the state of the object and doesn't connote much more. The distinction is, however, only slightly observed in common usage.
Best Answer
Please note that this is not based on any cited source but on my own observations.
Colloquia and seminars both happen in an academic setting. At my university we have a weekly physics colloquium that — in general — is geared to a well educated, but not specialized audience. (I.e., a particle physicist will present a topic on a fairly advanced level, but so that, say, a condensed matter physicist will still be able to understand). In general they seem to be more "populist" and less technical, covering popular topics in physics (quantum information, graphene) and in the news (global warming, nuclear weapons/power) but from the perspective of a scientist.
A seminar on the other hand, in an academic setting, is a much more specialized meeting, also with a formal academic presentation. For instance, there are weekly seminar meeting for the Atomic, Particle, String Theory, Condensed Matter, and Astrophysics groups. There is also an invited speaker, but the audience is much more technically versed and the topics tend to be much more technical or specific to the field. Generally someone from outside the field will have trouble understanding a seminar presentation.
In a grand sense the two words are equivalent, but a colloquium, as pointed out, is literally a "conversation" and in general has a connotation of being more broad, more accessible, or on a more popular topic.