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What is "barren"

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barren
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
barren
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a barren desert (=where no plants can grow)
▪ Years of intensive farming have turned the area into a barren desert.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
land
▪ Your living water in this barren land.
▪ Soon barren land will begin to show signs of fertility.
landscape
▪ The Fannichs are left behind as the road from Braemore turns north-west and enters a wide and barren landscape for several miles.
▪ Miles flew by in the barren landscape, punctuated only by the carcasses of kangaroos on the line.
woman
▪ The relic there was credited with making barren women pregnant and then relieving the pain of parturition.
▪ Also patron of barren women and heirs.
▪ There a barren woman is a potential witch and punished with low status and harsh treatment.
▪ It can make a barren woman fertile.
▪ First licensed by Bishop Lacey of Exeter in 1436 it was used for special intercession by barren women seeking fertility.
▪ As a barren woman, boyish physically, and shy, I had not found meaning with Helmut.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ a barren apartment in a poor area
▪ a pointless and barren discussion
▪ Intense heat had created a completely barren landscape, almost like the moon.
▪ the barren hillsides after the fire
▪ the rocky, barren slopes of the mountain
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ From the approach Amantani looked barren, rocky and sparsely inhabited.
▪ Lacking its tumultuously fruitful influence, our mental lives would be almost as barren as the moon.
▪ Later the level was taken off left and right along this, only to be proved a barren string.
▪ Now a Victorian church stands amid the barren Moor, a mute reminder of the lonely hamlet's more romantic past.
▪ Sir Thomas Blount's half-hearted investigation into Amy's death was absolutely barren.
▪ The future looked bleak and barren.
▪ The huge structures have endless corridors, barren hallways like tunnels that turn back upon themselves, leading nowhere.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Barren

Barren \Bar"ren\ (b[a^]r"ren), a. [OE. barein, OF. brehaing, fem. brehaigne, baraigne, F. br['e]haigne; of uncertain origin; cf. Arm. br['e]kha[~n], markha[~n], sterile; LL. brana a sterile mare, principally in Aquitanian and Spanish documents; Bisc. barau, baru, fasting.]

  1. Incapable of producing offspring; producing no young; sterile; -- said of women and female animals.

    She was barren of children.
    --Bp. Hall.

  2. Not producing vegetation, or useful vegetation; sterile. ``Barren mountain tracts.''
    --Macaulay.

  3. Unproductive; fruitless; unprofitable; empty.

    Brilliant but barren reveries.
    --Prescott.

    Some schemes will appear barren of hints and matter.
    --Swift.

  4. Mentally dull; stupid.
    --Shak.

    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 (Zo["o]l.), a peculiar bear, inhabiting the Barren Grounds, now believed to be a variety of the brown bear of Europe.

    Barren Ground caribou (Zo["o]l.), a small reindeer ( Rangifer Gr[oe]nlandicus) peculiar to the Barren Grounds and Greenland.

Barren

Barren \Bar"ren\, 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.]
    --J. Pickering.

Related phrases:
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
barren

c.1200, from Old French baraigne, baraing "sterile, barren" (12c.), perhaps originally brahain, of obscure derivation, perhaps from a Germanic language. In England, originally used of women, of land in France. Of land in English from late 14c. As a noun, mid-13c., "a barren woman;" later of land.\n\nBARRENS. Elevated lands, or plains upon which grow small trees, but never timber.

[Bartlett, "Dictionary of Americanisms," 1848]

Wiktionary
barren

a. 1 (label en not comparable) Unable to bear children; sterile. 2 Of poor fertility, infertile; not producing vegetation. 3 bleak. n. An area of low fertility and habitation, a desolate place.

WordNet
barren

n. an uninhabited wilderness that is worthless for cultivation; "the barrens of central Africa"; "the trackless wastes of the desert" [syn: waste, wasteland]

barren

  1. adj. providing no shelter or sustenance; "bare rocky hills"; "barren lands"; "the bleak treeless regions of the high Andes"; "the desolate surface of the moon"; "a stark landscape" [syn: bare, bleak, desolate, stark]

  2. not bearing offspring; "a barren woman"; "learned early in his marriage that he was sterile"

  3. incapable of sustaining life; "the dead and barren Moon"

Related phrases:
Gazetteer
Barren -- U.S. County in Kentucky
Population (2000): 38033
Housing Units (2000): 17095
Land area (2000): 490.973907 sq. miles (1271.616528 sq. km)
Water area (2000): 8.955255 sq. miles (23.194002 sq. km)
Total area (2000): 499.929162 sq. miles (1294.810530 sq. km)
Located within: Kentucky (KY), FIPS 21
Location: 36.984455 N, 85.933483 W
Headwords:
Barren
Barren, KY
Barren County
Barren County, KY
Wikipedia
Barren

Barren primarily refers to a state of barrenness ( infertility)

Barren may also refer to:

Related phrases:

Usage examples of "barren".

Here they found another ambuscade, but as barren and desert as the former.

Barren Lands by Nathan Bedlam, but beyond that he did not have a clue.

Its light reflected off the tall panes of thick glass before her, causing her coppery hair to shine incandescently, waves of red-gold illumination blanketing the frosty, barren peaks beyond.

University Chapel, she was attired in a scandalous Bloomer outfit, on her hands and knees in a barren, slate-floored room, chalking diagrams she had a notion her old minister would have considered blasphemous on the floor.

This herd of nobodies--younger sons with courtesy titles and empty pockets, ruined Guardsmen, briefless barristers--what was the use of telling Lady Maulevrier about such barren victories?

And if you get a malformed foal, well, some years your mare might slip or be barren anyway.

Great Slave Lake and all morning flew over those plains miscalled the Barrens, which, seen from above, are a delicate lace-work of lakes and streams criss-crossed by ridges of bald rock and banks of gravel, and with now and then in a hollow a patch of forest.

Far too likely, the clan company mustered from Halwythwood might not leave the barrens alive.

If delivering babies to barren couples was the most lucrative of professions, obstetrics in general was the most litigious.

The undulations of the peneplain had gradually become perceptible as such, next as low mounds of marl studded with broken rock, and then the land abruptly crumpled itself into a succession of barren knolls.

At all events he accomplished by his speeches a complete overthrow of his opponents the Phosphorists, without engaging in the barren polemics to which they invited him.

The stagecoach reached the pass at near the witching hour of twelve, an hour ahead of schedule, just as I, taking no chances, drove my own caleche with four black horses up close behind the diligence where it paused in the midnight landscape, half piny and half barren.

Sofya flung away the cigarette she had begun to smoke, turned to the piano, and again began to play the ringing plaints, the plaints of the lonely blocks of ice by the shore of the barren island in the sea of the far north.

On a planet with a small, warm sun that could be neither planetless Aklumar nor cool, barren Lassa and so must be Cimmaron.

Barren would soon be working up at some giddy height in a quietish street in Burford.