infertile

Etymology

It is borrowed from Middle French infertile,^[2][3][4] recorded from about 1425 as infertil,^[2] from Late Latin infertilis (“unproductive, barren”),^[2][3][4][5] which is from Latin in- (“not”) and fertilis (“fruitful, productive”).^[2][3][4] The Shorter Oxford and the Oxford Dictionary of English leave open whether the English word came from French or from Late Latin,^[6][7] and Dictionary.com gives Latin alone.^[8] Etymonline takes the Latin adjective from ferō (“to bear”), from Proto-Indo-European *bher- (“to carry, to bear children”).^[3]

Earliest recorded meaning

Of soil or land, unable to sustain crops or other vegetation: 1481, in Caxton's translation of the Siege and Conquest of Jerusalem.^[2] The OED's revision of 2025 thus puts the word more than a century before the dates in other dictionaries: 1597 in Merriam-Webster Unabridged,^[4] the 1590s in Etymonline,^[3] and the late 16th century in the Shorter Oxford.^[6]

Semantic evolution

French already applied the word to land and, by the 15th century, to people unable to have children, but English took some time to follow.^[2] It was first a word of farmland; a figurative use, of what produces nothing of value, is recorded from 1571.^[2] Living things came later: plants and fungi in 1641, eggs and seeds in 1653, in Harvey, and people and animals only in 1669.^[2] Johnson (1755) gave only "unfruitful; not productive", with a quotation that compares ignorance to infertile clay soil.^[9] In modern dictionaries the reproductive sense stands first.^[10][11]

Timeline

• 1481 – of soil or land, unable to sustain crops.^[2] Merriam-Webster Unabridged dates the word to 1597.^[4]
• 1571 – figurative, producing nothing of value.^[2]
• 1641 – of a plant or fungus, unable to produce fruit, seed or spores.^[2]
• 1653 – of an egg or seed, unable to produce a new individual.^[2]
• 1669 – of a person or animal, unable or less able to produce offspring.^[2]

Meanings

Adjective

1. Of a person or animal: unable, or less able, to produce offspring; sterile: an infertile breeding pair.^[10][11][2]
2. Of an egg or seed: not fertilized, and so unable to develop.^[11][2]
3. Of a plant or fungus: unable to produce fruit, seed or spores.^[2]
4. Of soil or land: unable to sustain crops or other vegetation; barren: the infertile slopes above the village.^{[10][11][4][2]}
5. Producing little or nothing of value: an infertile line of inquiry.^[11][2]

Word family

• infertility
• infertilely

Related words

• fertile

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 n o p q r Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
4. ^ a b c d e f Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
5. ^ Partridge, Eric (1966), Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 4th ed., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
6. ^ a b Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
7. ^ Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
8. ^ Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
9. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
10. ^ a b c Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
11. ^ a b c d e The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt