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say it: BAR-uhn
barren is an adjective and noun meaning "providing no shelter or sustenance". It carries 4 recorded senses.
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”
not bearing offspring
“a barren woman”
“learned early in his marriage that he was sterile”
completely wanting or lacking
“writing barren of insight”
“young recruits destitute of experience”
“innocent of literary merit”
“the sentence was devoid of meaning”
an uninhabited wilderness that is worthless for cultivation
“the barrens of central Africa”
“the trackless wastes of the desert”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for barren come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.