fertility

Etymology

It is partly borrowed from Middle French fertilité and partly borrowed from Latin fertilitās (“fruitfulness, productiveness”),^[2][3][4][5] from fertilis (“bearing in abundance, fruitful”),^[3][4] which comes from ferō (“to bear, carry”),^[3][6][7] the Latin verb related to English bear.^[4][8] The American Heritage Dictionary and Etymonline trace it to the Indo-European root Proto-Indo-European *bʰer- (“to carry, bear children”).^[6][3] Hoad compares Ancient Greek φερτός (phertós, “borne”).^[9] The OED notes that the French noun was used of land suitable for crops from the 14th century, and that the Latin word applied to land, crops, people and animals.^[2]

Earliest recorded meaning

Of land or soil, the quality of producing crops or other vegetation in abundance, and of a plant, the capacity to bear fruit or seed: about 1440, in an English translation of Palladius on husbandry.^[2] Barnhart finds fertilite probably before 1425, in a translation of Higden's Polychronicon.^[4]

Semantic evolution

From the land and its crops the word was extended to people and animals, the capacity to produce offspring, in 1559,^[2] and to eggs and seeds able to develop, in 1653, in William Harvey.^[2] A figurative sense, abundance or productiveness, is recorded from 1537, and the mind's capacity to produce many ideas, creativity, from 1667, in Dryden.^[2] Johnson (1755) defined it as fecundity, abundance and fruitfulness, quoting Shakespeare's Richard II on weeds that suck "the soil's fertility".^[10] In demography it has meant the actual number of births in a population since 1851,^[2][11] and since 1866 it has been distinguished from fecundity, the mere capacity to reproduce.^[12] Merriam-Webster also lists attributive uses such as fertility rites and fertility gods.^[5]

Timeline

• c. 1425 – fertilite, in a translation of Higden.^[4]
• ?1440 – of land, abundant production of crops; of a plant, ability to bear fruit or seed.^[2]
• 1537 – figurative, abundance, productiveness.^[2]
• 1559 – of people and animals, the ability to produce offspring.^[2]
• 1653 – of an egg or seed, the ability to develop into a new individual.^[2]
• 1667 – creativity, inventiveness.^[2]
• 1851 – in demography, the birth rate of a population.^[2]

Modern meaning

Noun

1. The ability to conceive children or produce offspring: The clinic treats couples with problems of fertility.
2. The quality of soil or land that makes it produce crops and vegetation in abundance.
3. (demography) The actual rate at which a population produces offspring; the birth rate.
4. Richness or productiveness of the mind or imagination; inventiveness.

Word family

• antifertility
• nonfertility
• overfertility
• fertility cult
• fertility drug

Related words

• fertile
• fertilize
• bear
• fecundity
• infertility

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
4. ^ a b c d e Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
5. ^ a b Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
6. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
7. ^ Weekley, Ernest (1921), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: John Murray
8. ^ Skeat, Walter W. (1911), A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, new ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
9. ^ Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
10. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
11. ^ Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
12. ^ Kay, Christian; Roberts, Jane; Samuels, Michael; Wotherspoon, Irené, eds. (2009), Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press; online edition (2024)