FERTILE • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Fertile

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/fˈərtəl/ /fərtˈaɪl/ Listen

adjective

Fertile adj.

Producing fruit or vegetation in abundance; fruitful; able to produce abundantly; prolific; fecund; productive; rich; inventive; as, fertile land or fields; a fertile mind or imagination. "Though he in a fertile climate dwell."

(Bot.)

(a)

Capable of producing fruit; fruit-bearing; as, fertile flowers.

(b)

Containing pollen; said of anthers.

Produced in abundance; plenteous; ample. "Henceforth, my early care... Shall tend thee, and the fertile burden ease Of thy full branches."

Synonyms: Fertile, Fruitful. Fertile implies the inherent power of production; fruitful, the act. The prairies of the West are fertile by nature, and are turned by cultivation into fruitful fields. The same distinction prevails when these words are used figuratively. A man of fertile genius has by nature great readiness of invention; one whose mind is fruitful has resources of thought and a readiness of application which enable him to think and act effectively.

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Etymology of 'Fertile'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Fertile" Quotes from Famous Books

... Courteneys, the captain himself being half Dutch in his origin, might incline to do more for those people down-stairs than was just to those above them—every way above them. The general called it a criminal error to plant the victims of a deadly contagion along a great national highway, like fertile seed in a fertile furrow. The bishop counted it no mercy to the aliens themselves to keep them aboard when they could be set ashore in a rough sort of roofless quarantine on some such isolated spot as ...

— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable

... tree his eyes Rinaldo bent, And there a marvel great and strange began; An aged oak beside him cleft and rent, And from his fertile, hollow womb, forth ran, Clad in rare weeds and strange habiliment, A nymph, for age able to go to man; An hundred plants beside, even in his sight, Childed an hundred nymphs, so great, ...

— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... of Erlingford Stood midst a fair domain, And Severn's ample waters near Roll'd through the fertile plain. ...

— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey

... Mediterranean Sea lie Crete, a place which had now become of little importance; Sicily, as much Greek as Roman, fertile in crops and possessed of many a splendid Greek temple and theatre; Sardinia, an unhealthy island infested by banditti, and employed as a sort of convict station, producing some amount of grain and minerals; and Corsica, which bore much the same ...

— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker

... inforced by her Majesties late and singular clemency in pardoning certayne his unduetifull misdemeanour." And by the modern Editors, to the late King; as "a Treatise composed by the most extensive and fertile Genius that ever any ...

— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith

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