1 (of humans or animals) not able to produce children or young animals
SYNINFERTILE
compareFERTILE
2 completely clean and free from bacteria:
sterile bandages / equipment * sterile water
3 (of a discussion, an argument, etc.) not producing any useful result:
a sterile debate
4 lacking individual personality, imagination or new ideas:
The room felt cold and sterile. * He felt creatively and emotionally sterile.
5 (of land) not good enough to produce crops
sterility noun [U]:
The disease can cause sterility in men and women. * the meaningless sterility of statistics * She contemplated the sterility of her life.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for sterile is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is sterile a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, sterile is tagged as adjective.
Does sterile appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — sterile appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
