Is there a clear-cut difference between dissatisfied and unsatisfied?
Learn English – What’s the difference between “dissatisfied” and “unsatisfied”
adjectivesdifferencesmeaningnegative-prefixespast-participles
Related Solutions
Suasive is an adjective that, in Linguistics (Grammar), "denotes a class of English verbs, for example, insist, whose meaning includes the notion of persuading and that take a subordinate clause whose verb may either be in the subjunctive or take a modal."
Persuasive is an adjective as well, that means being "good at persuading someone to do or believe something through reasoning or the use of temptation:
an informative and persuasive speech." OR "She was very persuasive!"
The difference, then, is that while the former denotes a grammatical class for verbs, the second is adopted the way you already know, with people, situations, etc.
EDIT NOTE: In the OED it says that a speech can be "suasive" but considering the OALD and my dictionary didn't have it, I supposed it was an old use or it fell into disuse. So I checked the Ngram on google and it confirmed what Billare said and what I was thinking.
Under the entry for laughable in Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003), a note on synonyms has this side-by-side comparison of ludicrous and ridiculous:
LUDICROUS suggests absurdity that excites both laughter and scorn {a thriller with a ludicrous plot}. RIDICULOUS suggests extreme absurdity, foolishness, or contemptibility {a ridiculous display of anger}.
So the distinction between ludicrous and ridiculous, MW seems to assert, comes down to the difference between absurdity that may provoke scorn and absurdity that may provoke contempt, within a larger context in which both words involve "provoking laughter or mirth." In my experience, ludicrous tends to be used most often to describe a situation that has elements of farcical incongruity, whereas ridiculous is a more common, all-purpose term whose meaning amounts to "not to be taken seriously."
As the following Ngram chart for ludicrous (red line) versus ridiculous (blue line) for the period 1700–2005 indicates, the frequency of use of both terms in Google Books' database of published works has decreased slightly but fairly steadily for most of the past century, and the difference in frequency between the two words has remained remarkably consistent:
Best Answer
The feeling connected with a lack of satisfaction can have two different components:
A sense of incompleteness, which leaves one feeling unsatisfied
A sense of wrongness, which leaves one feeling dissatisfied
Naturally, both senses may overlap in certain situations. Take the following example:
[He suspected that some important details were missing from the principal's explanation.]
[He suspected that he was being lied to.]
If I was John's father in this situation, I would most likely choose to describe my feeling as dissatisfaction, which would better reflect my state of active displeasure, and would also encompass both the incompleteness and the wrongness I had perceived in the principal's explanation.
Had I merely felt that some information was missing, the result would have been a lack of satisfaction.