Crossword clues for fecund
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Fecund \Fec"und\, a. [L. fecundus, from the root of fetus: cf.
F. f['e]cond. see Fetus.]
Fruitful in children; prolific.
--Graunt.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
a 16c. Latinizing revision of the spelling of Middle English fecond (early 15c.), from Middle French fecond (Old French fecont "fruitful"), from Latin fecundus "fruitful, fertile, productive; rich, abundant," from *fe-kwondo-, suffixed form (adjectival) of Latin root *fe-, corresponding to PIE *dhe(i)- "to suck, suckle," also "produce, yield."\n
\nCognates include: Sanskrit dhayati "sucks," dhayah "nourishing;" Greek thele "mother's breast, nipple," thelys "female, fruitful;" Old Church Slavonic dojiti "to suckle," dojilica "nurse," deti "child;" Lithuanian dele "leech;" Old Prussian dadan "milk;" Gothic daddjan "to suckle;" Old Swedish dia "suckle;" Old High German tila "female breast;" Old Irish denaim "I suck," dinu "lamb."\n
\nAlso from the same Latin root come felare "to suck;" femina "woman" (*fe-mna-, literally "she who suckles"); felix "happy, auspicious, fruitful;" fetus "offspring, pregnancy;" fenum "hay" (probably literally "produce"); and probably filia/filius "daughter/son," assimilated from *felios, originally "a suckling."
Wiktionary
a. 1 (context formal English) highly fertile; able to produce offspring. 2 (context figuratively English) Leading to new ideas or innovation.
WordNet
Usage examples of "fecund".
fecundal selection is said by them to be constantly tending to increase the reproductive rate, because fecundity is partly a matter of heredity, and the fecund parents leave more offspring with the same characteristic.
American stock are on the whole more sterile or, if not sterile, less fecund, than other women in the United States.
Roger took a deep breath, a whiff of dead whale mingling with the fecund scent of the salt marsh behind.
She looked him up and down in a bold sort of way, then, evidently approving, put her hands under her breasts in a gesture of unmistakable invitation, jerking her head toward a corner of the shed, where mounds of damp straw gave off a fecund scent of not-unpleasant decay.
Between them and the vision, between the fecund San Joaquin, reeking with fruitfulness, and the millions of Asia crowding toward the verge of starvation, lay the iron-hearted monster of steel and steam, implacable, insatiable, huge--its entrails gorged with the life blood that it sucked from an entire commonwealth, its ever hungry maw glutted with the harvests that should have fed the famished bellies of the whole world of the Orient.
Mixing with scents carried by the moist, heavy wind, they made a stew for the senses, spiced with fecund exudates of life.
Given the size of the house, Maia had expected to see more fecund Joplands, till she realized.
Take a fish or lizard, ideally suited to her environment, with just the right internal chemistry, agility, camouflagewhatever it takes to be healthy, fecund, and successful in her world.
Here were bottomless skies, and many kinds of fecund life, some mobile, some fixed, some edible, many poisonous, some lower on the food chain.
They rotated slowly, five like the five railway lines of the city, buoyed by the massive profane urban presence below them, a fecund crawling place such as none of their kind had ever experienced before.
Evolved among the hedgerows and grassplots of North China this animal is the living, breathing symbol of greenness, of fecund, perennial plant life, of the transitional stage between vegetable and animal.
She should have loved the rain forest with its clean streams and beautiful fecund greenery.
Italy who eat a lot of rapeseed or other peasanty staple that makes their piss high in progesterone or some such fecund elixir.
The fecund and unblemished verdancy of Earth, an innocent Earth, before the Fall.
When they discovered a world of fecund oceans and sweet, untainted air, they quickened the zygotes and nursed the baby whales through their childhood terrors of sharks and other predators.