Other forms: purest, purer
Pure means nothing else has been mixed in — the thing is all itself. Orange juice with no water and no sugar in it; a ring of pure gold.
Pure also means clean and free of anything harmful: pure mountain air, pure spring water. Put it in front of a noun and it becomes an intensifier meaning complete, as in pure luck, pure nonsense, a pure coincidence. There is a moral use as well, a pure heart and pure motives, which sounds old-fashioned outside church. In universities, pure maths and pure science mean the theoretical kind, as opposed to applied. The noun is purity, the verb is purify, and purely means only: purely by chance.
1adjectivepureNot mixed with anything else; made of one substance only.~28%
“The jumper is pure wool, which is why it costs that much.”
synonyms: unmixed, undiluted
2adjectivedirtClean and free of dirt or anything harmful.~2%
“The water here is pure enough to drink straight from the stream.”
3adjectivecompleteComplete; nothing but that. Used before a noun for emphasis.~41%
“Finding the ring in the sand was pure luck.”
4adjectivemorallyMorally clean; free of bad intentions.~2%
“His motives were pure, whatever the newspapers decided later.”
5adjectivestudiedStudied as theory rather than for a practical use.~27%
“She left engineering for pure mathematics in her second year.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Pure came through Old French pur from Latin pūrus, which covered clean, unmixed and plain all at once, and behind it a Proto-Indo-European root pewH- meaning to cleanse. English already had its own words for the idea — lutter, skere, schir, smete, all now dead — and the French one pushed every last one of them out.
Proto-Indo-European
*pewH- — to cleanse, purify
Latin
pūrus — clean, free from dirt or filth, unmixed, plain
Old French
pur
Middle English
pure
English, today
pure
From Middle English pure, pur, from Old French pur, from Latin pūrus (“clean, free from dirt or filth, unmixed, plain”), from Proto-Indo-European pewH- (“to cleanse, purify”). Displaced native Middle English lutter (“pure, clear, sincere”) (from Old English hlūtor, hluttor), Middle English skere (“pure, sheer, clear”) (from Old English scǣre and Old Norse skǣr), Middle English schir (“clear, pure”) (from Old English scīr), Middle English smete (“pure, refined”) (from Old English smǣte; compare Old English mǣre (“pure”)).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA