Sterile means completely free of germs — nothing alive on it at all. The sealed needle, the instruments in their paper wrapper on a hospital tray, the gloves a surgeon pulls on and then touches nothing else with.
The second sterile is about atmosphere: a sterile room is white, clean and lifeless, and a sterile smell is the one that hits you in a waiting room. It stretches further to anything that produces nothing — a sterile argument goes nowhere, sterile ground grows nothing. In biology sterile means unable to have young or produce seed, said of people, animals and plants alike. The verb is sterilize: you sterilize bottles by boiling them. The pair worth learning together is sterile and fertile.
1adjectivesterileCompletely free from bacteria and other living things.~48%
“The wound was dressed with a sterile bandage.”
2adjectivesmellClean and bare in a cold, unwelcoming way.~2%
“The flat was spotless but sterile — white walls, no pictures, nothing out.”
3adjectivebarrenUnable to produce children, young or seeds.~48%
“The hybrid plants are sterile and cannot spread on their own.”
synonyms: barren, infertile
4adjectiveproducingProducing no useful result.~2%
“The meeting turned into a sterile argument about wording.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 8 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Sterile came through Middle French stérile from Latin sterilis, "barren, futile", a relation of Ancient Greek στεῖρα. The oldest meaning is the farming one — ground that grows nothing — and the hospital meaning grew out of it much later. A sterile bandage is barren land: nothing lives there.
Latin
sterilis — barren, futile
Middle French
stérile
English, today
sterile
From Middle French stérile, from Latin sterilis (“barren, futile”). See also Ancient Greek στεῖρα.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA