hey, nicht so viele und nicht so radikal grundverschiedene Antworten bitte :-)

To be honest I am not sure of which term have I heard more often, however I think "wildly different" could only be used in a more informal situation than "widely" different given that it is kind of an exageration triying to point out the existance of a reeeeeeally abismal enormous difference between two things. Any widely (wildly) different opinions out there from any natives? :)

@mariotol - This native speaker thinks you got the idea pretty well.

I've always understood the phrase as "wildly different", and to be honest "widely different" doesn't make much sense to me, since difference isn't measured in width. (Yes, two different things can be said to be far apart, but that's distance and not width.)

"Wildly different" is certainly an informal expression - the formal equivalent would be something along the lines of "utterly different"

... however "widely different" gets several times as many Google hits as "wildly different" (even on .uk sites, so it's not an AE/BE difference). But the more I repeat the phrases, the more bizarre "wildly different" sounds to me...

Correction!

...the more bizarre "widely different" sounds to me...

Obviously it's time to go home and re-charge my brain cells.

My mother thonge is Spanish and in my language for example the term "ampliamente diferentes", which can be directly and literally translated in English as "widely different" does exist, maybe for that reason "widely different" doesn't sound so crazy to me. I mean, it is right that two things could be really apart from each other and this existing gap could be a wide one, thus the expresion "widely different". I would stick to my original suggestion but as I said before... The natives should know better :)

I think in a formal/more formal setting I would say "vastly different". I am not positive if I would only use "wildly different" in an informal setting. For some reason, "widely different" just does not seem like something I would use.

Thanks guys, most wildly interesting. Also thanks to Becky (who nonetheless was included in the guys, hope you don't mind) for the additional alternative *vastly different*. I translate culture-vulture texts a lot, and there I need them all the time.

And now: Eyes Wildly Shut

No problem WernR. I also just noticed a very bad typo on incorrect wording in my post. I meant to say that I am not sure whether I would use "wildly different" in a Formal setting. I definitely would use it in an informal setting.