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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
sterile
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
debate
▪ Roy Hattersley's simultaneous resignation as deputy leader also opens up the increasingly sterile debate on constitutional reform.
▪ This threatens to become a sterile debate, but there are ways to make progress.
▪ Legal theory has long been bedevilled by a sterile debate between positivists and natural lawyers.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ a sterile laboratory
▪ a sterile, meaningless relationship
▪ a group of sterile skyscrapers
▪ Giving blood is perfectly safe. All equipment is sterile, used once and thrown away.
▪ Red Cross officials say they are running short of disinfectant and sterile bandages.
▪ Some women who used the birth control device became sterile.
▪ Susan thought that her illness had made her sterile.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ During the sterile Eighties, we overdosed on design and killed freedom of expression.
▪ In a sterile world casein would be nearly an ideal glue.
▪ It lost to a politicized plan, which resulted in the sterile towers and hidden plazas that now mark Bunker Hill.
▪ The floors of old-growth forests tend to be fairly sterile because overhead canopies of leaves prevent light from reaching the ground.
▪ There are even sterile controls for the piped music.
▪ They are native to dry and sterile regions.
▪ This does not, however, render the question of social origins of state personnel, such as bureaucrats, sterile.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Sterile

Sterile \Ster"ile\, a. [F. st['e]rile, L. sterilis, akin to Gr. stereo`s stiff, solid, stei^ros barren, stei^ra a cow that has not calved, Goth. stair[=o], fem., barren. See Stare to gaze.]

  1. Producing little or no crop; barren; unfruitful; unproductive; not fertile; as, sterile land; a sterile desert; a sterile year.

  2. (Biol.)

    1. Incapable of reproduction; unfitted for reproduction of offspring; not able to germinate or bear fruit; unfruitful; as, a sterile flower, which bears only stamens.

    2. Free from reproductive spores or germs; as, a sterile fluid.

  3. Fig.: Barren of ideas; destitute of sentiment; as, a sterile production or author.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
sterile

mid-15c., "barren," from Middle French stérile "not producing fruit," from Latin sterilis "barren, unproductive, unfruitful; unrequited; unprofitable," from PIE *ster- (1) "stiff, rigid, firm, strong" (see stereo-). Also see torpor. Originally in English with reference to soil; of persons (chiefly females), from 1530s. The sense of "sterilized, free from living germs" is first recorded 1877.

Wiktionary
sterile

a. 1 (context uncomparable English) Unable to reproduce (or procreate). 2 unprofitable#English. 3 germless#English; free from all living or viable microorganisms.

WordNet
sterile
  1. adj. incapable of reproducing; "an infertile couple" [syn: unfertile, infertile] [ant: fertile]

  2. free of or using methods to keep free of pathological microorganisms; "a sterile operating area"; "aseptic surgical instruments"; "aseptic surgical techniques" [syn: aseptic]

  3. deficient in originality or creativity; lacking powers of invention; "a sterile ideology lacking in originality"; "unimaginative development of a musical theme"; "uninspired writing" [syn: unimaginative, uninspired, uninventive]

Usage examples of "sterile".

Be he accurst in the waters of the flood that shall sweep his life sterile!

In this role Shatov is ideologically counterbalanced by his neighbor Kirillov, a Westernizer who has lost the ability to speak his native Russian fluently, whose atheism leads to the apotheosis of individual will, and whose sterile conception of freedom brings him inescapably to suicide.

Within hours of each other there had been an admission from a car crash to set up on traction after Orthopaedics had finished patching him up and drips and analgesia to regulate in the sterile side ward for two young burns victims from a house fire.

Living religious traditions begin to degenerate when their followers replace effective spiritual purification, attentional training, and contemplative inquiry with sterile liturgies, ritualistic meditations, and contemplative exercises pursued with the sense that the practitioner already knows their outcome.

His white face, glimmering with sweat, alarmed Rachel more than the sight of Alma spread-eagled on the table in lithotomy position, feet up in stirrups, huge belly draped in a sterile blue sheet.

The two dozen embryos arrayed upon the counter, each one no more than a few millimeters long and each suspended in a sterile dish containing an artificial growth medium of her own invention, were the end of a long and meticulous process of elimination and experimentation, expressly designed to create human embryos genetically superior to those created through the random genetic shuffling of ordinary reproduction.

The treatment mainly killed the microfilariae, preventing them from becoming adults, and it rendered the adult worms sterile.

Ahead of Michaelmas were storage cubes, work surfaces, instrumentation panels, sterile racks of teasing needles, forceps and scalpels, microtomes, a bank of micromanipulative devices all shrouded beneath transparent flexible dust hoods or safe behind glassy panels.

Not long ago, on the first sterile sea planet where Jess had distributed the living water beings, there had not been even the rudiments of monocellular life.

Shw, motioning them into the room with its sterile obstetrical workstation and pink dungeon.

Uliar let his eyes drift around the number three messroom, as sterile and military looking as everything else aboard Outbound Flight.

I knew something of Howard Hugheshis physical courage, the curious overdriven masculinity of his films, the fear of disease that would deliver him, at the end of his life, to the wrong side of a sterile cell door.

Here, it must be granted, is an individual of a very high and definite and individually complete type, no accident or sport, but, in fact, essential for the type and continuance of the species to which she belongs, and yet, though highly individualized and worthy to represent individuality at its best and highest, the worker-bee, so far from being designed for parenthood, is sterile, and her distinctive characters and utilities are conditional upon her sterility.

In the operating room the resuscitation team was going through the process of making themselves sterile, putting on their aseptic tunics and gloves and tying their cotton shoes.

They developed all that was really sterile in Scholasticism, and left for us all that is really fruitful in Thomism.