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Barren   /bˈærən/  /bˈɛrən/   Listen
adjective
Barren  adj.  
1.
Incapable of producing offspring; producing no young; sterile; said of women and female animals. "She was barren of children."
2.
Not producing vegetation, or useful vegetation; sterile. "Barren mountain tracts."
3.
Unproductive; fruitless; unprofitable; empty. "Brilliant but barren reveries." "Some schemes will appear barren of hints and matter."
4.
Mentally dull; stupid.
Barren flower, a flower which has only stamens without a pistil, or which has neither stamens nor pistils.
Barren Grounds (Geog.), a vast tract in British America northward of the forest regions.
Barren Ground bear (Zool.), a peculiar bear, inhabiting the Barren Grounds, now believed to be a variety of the brown bear of Europe.
Barren Ground caribou (Zool.), a small reindeer (Rangifer Groenlandicus) peculiar to the Barren Grounds and Greenland.


noun
Barren  n.  
1.
A tract of barren land.
2.
pl. Elevated lands or plains on which grow small trees, but not timber; as, pine barrens; oak barrens. They are not necessarily sterile, and are often fertile. (Amer.)





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Barren" Quotes from Famous Books



... you've fallen into everybody's mistake, as a matter of course. Those fine long shoots will grow into big branches; those little twigs with the points, as you call them, are fruit spurs, covered with blossom buds. If I cut them out I should have no plums next year, but a bigger and a more barren tree. No, my boy, I don't want to grow wood, ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... their picture. Of course I forgot to roll the film, and a little later Friend Husband decided to photograph the enormous pillar that gives the name to Monument Creek. The result was rather amazing when we developed the film a week later. The wild burros were grazing placidly on the summit of a barren rock, a couple of hundred feet in the air, without visible means of ascent or descent. The Chief made a few sarcastic remarks about this picture, but I firmly reminded him my burros were there first! ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... a little pool of light in what I felt to be a large room. I was prepared for a disclosure of barren ugliness, and waited, in heartsick foreboding, for the silent guide to reveal ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... saw him crushing the one, and bringing the other into jeopardy, with a quietness and composure on his part that I could not recollect without horror. I knew not what were his plans respecting me. I knew not whether he troubled himself so much as to form a barren wish for the preservation of one whose future prospects he had so iniquitously tarnished. I had hitherto been silent as to my principal topic of recrimination. But I was by no means certain, that I should consent to go out of the world in ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... endured it. My soul was sick of all this secrecy, sick at the injustice of mankind. In spite of worldly success, my life was cold and barren in the strange land to which I had fled. My home called to me and I came back ...
— The Case of the Registered Letter • Augusta Groner


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