WILDERNESS • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Wilderness

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/wˈɪldərnəs/ Listen

noun

Wilderness n.

A tract of land, or a region, uncultivated and uninhabited by human beings, whether a forest or a wide, barren plain; a wild; a waste; a desert; a pathless waste of any kind. "The wat'ry wilderness yields no supply."

A disorderly or neglected place.

Quality or state of being wild; wildness. (Obs.) "These paths and bowers doubt not but our joint hands. Will keep from wilderness with ease."

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Etymology of 'Wilderness'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Wilderness" Quotes from Famous Books

... woods in the dark on trapping expeditions times enough. They had even been in the darkness on the dangerous cliff slopes again and again, so that they had no hesitation in going rapidly on till the lake had been skirted and the wilderness reached, without their being challenged. Then the dense undergrowth was entered, and they stood ...

— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn

... beautiful And unimaginable ether! and Ye multiplying masses of increased 100 And still-increasing lights! what are ye? what Is this blue wilderness of interminable Air, where ye roll along, as I have seen The leaves along the limpid streams of Eden? Is your course measured for ye? Or do ye Sweep on in your unbounded revelry Through an aerial universe of endless Expansion—at which my soul ...

— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... well-to-do inhabitants were not ashamed to sell their young, beautiful daughters to the Pashas of Constantinople, permanent order has been everywhere established and many abuses suppressed; in Siberia, which was little better than a wilderness, there are now thousands of prosperous farmers, railways and river steamboats have been constructed, and the mineral resources are being rapidly developed; thanks to the improvement of communications in that part of the empire, Peking is now well ...

— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various

... early seventies the fashionable quarter lay between Eighth and Fortieth Streets, bounded on either side by Fourth and Sixth Avenues. Central Park was completed, but the region west of it was, from the social stand-point, still a wilderness, and Fifth Avenue in the neighborhood of Twenty-third Street was the centre of elegant social life. Selma took her first view of this brilliant street on the following day on her way to hunt for houses in the outlying district. The roar and bustle of the city, which ...

— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant

... hands was classed with the temptations of St. Anthony. So we had to come away as we went, and get the better as we could of our disappointment, and really it was a disappointment not to be able to stay our two months out in the wilderness as we had planned it, to say nothing of the heat of Florence, to which at the moment it was not pleasant to return. But we got new lodgings in the shade and comforted ourselves as well as we could. 'Comforted'—there's a word for Florence—that ingratitude was a slip of ...

— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

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