drier

UK/ˈdɹaɪə/US/ˈdɹaɪɚ/

adjectiveA2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,013 of 15,258leans written

Drier means containing less moisture. A drier climate, drier than last year, drier wood.

Wood must be drier than about twenty per cent moisture to burn well, which is why seasoning matters. Of wine and humour, drier means less sweet and more deadpan. Note the spelling: drier is the comparative of dry, and dryer is usually the machine — though both spellings are found for both jobs and nobody is much troubled.

Definitions of drier

1adjectivedrierContaining less moisture.A2+
“This side of the valley is much drier, and very little grows there.”

drier is a comparison of dryness.

Also accepted in games: dryer

Where it comes from

Dry plus -er. The spelling drier for the comparative and dryer for the machine is a modern convention rather than a rule.

Middle English
driere
English, today
drier

Built from

dreyere · Middle English — one who dries

From Middle English driere, dreyere (“one who dries”), equivalent to dry + er.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Word Building

Practise this word

drier in the wild

In another example, the quantity of sediment entering a river channel may increase when climate becomes drier.
Aggradation
The drier conditions cause river flow to decrease at the same time as sediment is being supplied in greater quantities, resulting in the river becoming choked with sediment.
Aggradation
There is a rich variety of species, such as red fescue in drier areas, and salad burnet in damper ones.
Southorpe Meadow
The river flows during the Tasmanian winter and spring, with flow reducing over the drier summer months.
Lea River
The eastern fields are grazed by cattle and the eastern ones, which are drier, have a late hay crop.
Kingcup Meadows and Oldhouse Wood

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

← Vocabulary