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Sterile   /stˈɛrəl/   Listen
adjective
Sterile  adj.  
1.
Producing little or no crop; barren; unfruitful; unproductive; not fertile; as, sterile land; a sterile desert; a sterile year.
2.
(Biol.)
(a)
Incapable of reproduction; unfitted for reproduction of offspring; not able to germinate or bear fruit; unfruitful; as, a sterile flower, which bears only stamens.
(b)
Free from reproductive spores or germs; as, a sterile fluid.
3.
Fig.: Barren of ideas; destitute of sentiment; as, a sterile production or author.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sterile" Quotes from Famous Books



... or her, as an independent princess, to endure. England was the husband which she had betrothed to her; Englishmen were her children; while employed in rearing and governing such a family, she could not deem herself sterile or her life useless. She desired, for her own part, no higher character, nor fairer remembrance of her to be transmitted to posterity, than to have this inscription, when she should pay the debt of nature, engraven on her tomb: "Here lies Queen Elizabeth, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... southern Dakota. The houses, bare as boxes, dropped on the treeless plains, the barbed-wire fences running at right angles, and the towns mere assemblages of flimsy wooden sheds with painted-pine battlement, produced on me the effect of an almost helpless and sterile poverty. ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland

... theoretical side of his labours—labours from which the youngest and least impressionable planeur might well have shrunk. He had traced through cold and heat, across the deeps of the oceans, with instruments of his own invention, over the inhospitable heart of the polar ice and the sterile visage of the deserts, league by league, patiently, unweariedly, remorselessly, from their ever-shifting cradle under the magnetic pole to their exalted death-bed in the utmost ether of the upper atmosphere—each ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling

... obligations, loyalty to our friends, patience in finishing our work, obedience to a rule of life, have a surer foundation in habits solidly formed and blindly followed than in these momentary transports, ardent but sterile. They would have preferred to Bloch, as companions for myself, boys who would have given me no more than it is proper, by all the laws of middle-class morality, for boys to give one another, who would not unexpectedly ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... The youth, the early light that he has lost Are as a little strength submerged and drowned In this fierce rage that bids him seek me out And take me in the darkness of my home, And change, and fill me, as the virgin night Is changed to day, and as the moonlight sky Is emptied of her sterile ray, and filled With overflooding light that spills to earth A golden augury of later fruits And a ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various


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