Barren land is too poor or too dry for anything to grow on it. Cracked earth, grey stone, a field that gives nothing back year after year.
The word reaches well beyond soil. A barren room is bare and cheerless, barren years are years that produce nothing, and a barren discussion goes round in circles and ends where it began. The old use — of a woman or an animal unable to have young — still turns up in stories and in farming, but said about a person today it wounds, and you will be heard as cruel. The pair to learn is barren and fertile. It sits most naturally with landscape: a barren slope, a barren wasteland, a barren stretch of coast where nothing but gorse holds on.
1adjectivebarren(of land) Too poor or dry for plants to grow.
“Nothing grew on the barren slope above the village.”
synonyms: infertile, desolate
2adjectivewoman(of a woman or an animal) Unable to have young. An old use, and a hurtful one about a person.
“In the old stories the barren queen is sent away in disgrace.”
3adjectiveproducingProducing no result at all.
“Ten barren years followed, with no new book and no money.”
Also accepted in games: infertile
Barren came through Middle English bareyne from Anglo-Norman baraigne, meaning sterile or barren. Where the Anglo-Norman word itself came from is not settled. One guess traces it to Frankish bar, bare or barren, from Proto-Germanic *bazaz, bare — which would make barren a distant cousin of plain English bare.
Proto-Germanic
*bazaz — bare
Frankish
*baʀ — bare; barren
Anglo-Norman
baraigne
Middle English
bareyne
English, today
barren
Built from
From Middle English bareyne, from Anglo-Norman baraigne, baraing (“sterile; barren”), of obscure origin; probably from a gem language, perhaps Frankish baʀ (“bare; barren”), from Proto-Germanic bazaz (“bare”). If so, a cognate of English bare.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Nature & Weather, Sharper Adjectives, Farm & Countryside