What's the difference between barren and desolate?

Barren


Definition:

  • (a.) Incapable of producing offspring; producing no young; sterile; -- said of women and female animals.
  • (a.) Not producing vegetation, or useful vegetation; /rile.
  • (a.) Unproductive; fruitless; unprofitable; empty.
  • (a.) Mentally dull; stupid.
  • (n.) A tract of barren land.
  • (n.) Elevated lands or plains on which grow small trees, but not timber; as, pine barrens; oak barrens. They are not necessarily sterile, and are often fertile.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Blueberry barrens stretch over several acres in Wesley, Maine.
  • (2) During a year of residence in the essentially allergen-free, barren environment of Antarctica, allergic subjects were entirely sypmtom-free.
  • (3) Mean calving to conception intervals were 91.4 and 85.3 days (P < 0.01) and the incidence of barren cows was 10.2 and 5.3% (NS).
  • (4) Nobody is sure what dangerous chemical imbalance this would create but the Fiver is convinced we'd all be dust come October or November, the earth scorched, with only three survivors roaming o'er the barren landscape: Govan's answer to King Lear, ranting into a hole in the ground; a mute, wild-eyed pundit, staring without blinking into a hole in the ground; and a tall, irritable figure standing in front of the pair of them, screaming in the style popularised by Klaus Kinski, demanding they take a look at his goddamn trouser arrangement, which he has balanced here on the platform of his hand for easy perusal, or to hell with them, for they are no better than pigs, worthless, spineless pigs.
  • (5) BBC footage showed Tebbutt wearing a green headscarf running towards a plane in a flat, barren landscape.
  • (6) Forced removals and dumping of millions of people into small, disconnected, barren, poor reserve areas, bereft of adequate medical, psychiatric and public health services (the 'final solution' of the 'native problem') causes widespread malnutrition, infectious and other diseases, and high mortality and mental-illness rates.
  • (7) There is no difference in the cyclicity of indices studied between pregnant and barren mares.
  • (8) Many cities have a history of hosting refugees; indeed, the typical image of a refugee dwelling – straight rows of nondescript tents set up on barren, faraway lands – is misleading.
  • (9) There were three groups: pregnant (P) ewes (n = 6) which each reared twin lambs, hormone-treated (H) ewes (n = 7) which were not pregnant and were given exogenous hormones (dexamethasone, oestradiol-17 beta, progesterone) for 37 days to induce udder development and milk production, and untreated barren (B) ewes (n = 6).
  • (10) Last year, Icelandic authorities rejected a Chinese billionaire's bid to turn land in the country's barren north into a holiday resort .
  • (11) It’s in these barren parts that the Edwards air force base is located, where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier for the first time, and where the test pilots celebrated in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff proved their mettle before going on to become America’s first astronauts.
  • (12) I grit my teeth as the trees hunker down smaller and smaller, then finally give up entirely, leaving us alone in a barren upland area where there is one large grey house partially obscured by torn curtains of freezing rain.
  • (13) 9 of 30 camels which were barren for a long period were found to be positive for C. fetus.
  • (14) Between 1982 and 1985, 1015 mares were evaluated using the following parameters: age, mare status (maiden, barren, lactating), Caslick index, Caslick operation, ovarian cycle, ovarian and follicular size, treatments (hCG and intrauterine infusions), number of ovulations after mating (184 mares), number of conceptuses present, dimensions of embryonic vesicles, and pregnancy status 45 days after mating.
  • (15) In 2007 the conservative senator, Bill Heffernan, accused the prime minister, then in opposition, of being unfit for leadership because she was "deliberately barren".
  • (16) All dogs from which necropsy samples were obtained harbored low numbers of adult female worms, some of which were barren.
  • (17) And no wonder, so seductively dystopian is its premise: that a species can be eradicated by altering the genetic code of males in captivity so that they will only be able to produce sterile offspring, then releasing them into the wild to mate with unsuspecting females, rendering the next generation barren.
  • (18) To analyse the junction point between the expression site and the inserted gene, these two barren regions were cloned and sequenced.
  • (19) He looks down dismissively at the guilty patch of barren earth.
  • (20) The presence of the nuclear plant is a beacon of employment in an otherwise barren jobs landscape.

Desolate


Definition:

  • (a.) Destitute or deprived of inhabitants; deserted; uninhabited; hence, gloomy; as, a desolate isle; a desolate wilderness; a desolate house.
  • (a.) Laid waste; in a ruinous condition; neglected; destroyed; as, desolate altars.
  • (a.) Left alone; forsaken; lonely; comfortless.
  • (a.) Lost to shame; dissolute.
  • (a.) Destitute of; lacking in.
  • (v. t.) To make desolate; to leave alone; to deprive of inhabitants; as, the earth was nearly desolated by the flood.
  • (v. t.) To lay waste; to ruin; to ravage; as, a fire desolates a city.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Downtown LA is improving, but for years it was a desolate hell zone of freeways, office blocks and closed stores.
  • (2) The coast here feels like an island, desolate and full of surprises.
  • (3) The Eritrean government requires every pupil to complete their final year of high school by serving in Sawa Military Camp, in the desolate, semi-desert region of eastern Eritrea .
  • (4) But for the next few hours, though, there's little to excite us: Joseph Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) The economic data calendar is a desolate wasteland of nothingness.
  • (5) When it is not clogged with weekend traffic, Container – the English word is used in Arabic – is a desolate spot: a lonely stretch of asphalt, four dingy tollbooth-like structures painted white and green, a few bored Israeli soldiers with automatic rifles.
  • (6) They are kept in a small pen behind the Lion's Den, a pub on a ranch in desolate countryside 75 miles south of Johannesburg.
  • (7) It was after the Indian wars of the 1870s that the indigenous tribes started to be consigned to reservations – on the worst, most desolate lands for grazing or growing crops.
  • (8) And, Jinkyo-En which was a desolate waste has come to an oasis in life for the Hansenites.
  • (9) The first time I saw the building - a stark, unapologetically angular silver bunker throwing back the heat of a rather desolate part of Berlin - I was content to register its disturbance without question, submitting to its strategies of oppression and disorientation as a child would.
  • (10) "Given the complexity of this crisis and the extent of the distress of our people from the north … we must together, I say together, clear the path ahead to free our country from these invaders, who only leave desolation, deprivation and pain in their wake."
  • (11) And it's Christmas bonanza time along the high streets of Britain, where Oxfam outlets and estate agents lie lonely amid empty sites and desolate closed doors.
  • (12) Australian visual effects wizard Dave Clayton has been nominated for his work on The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.
  • (13) But, like many streets in New York City and in cities across the US, it is becoming increasingly desolate.
  • (14) Season two crafted complex characters racked with existential ambivalence – heroines marked for the abyss, fragile, flammable outcasts and desolate prodigies, all of whose private pain was as palpable as the crimson bloodbath head witch Evelyn Poole soaks in.
  • (15) Instead, they suggest expanding the scope of services in family planning clinics, out of an awareness that the continuing high prevalence of unintended childbearing, among the young and disadvantaged in particular, is part of a larger problem of living in a desolate social environment.
  • (16) "I watched this guy brushing off dirt from a skull in the most desolate landscape and right then I just knew," Rincón said of his first encounter with palaeontology.
  • (17) There was nothing to see for miles but sage-covered high desert, a landscape of stark beauty and eerie desolation.
  • (18) The contemporary state of the sub-discipline of endocrinology within the framework of internal medicine is generally considered rather desolate, but so far actual data were lacking.
  • (19) Howell said in July: "There are large uninhabited and desolate areas, certainly up in the north-east where there's plenty of room for fracking well away from anyone's residence where it can be conducted without any kind of threat to the rural environment."
  • (20) A subroutine called DESOL for the numerical solution of ordinary differential equations of the type arising in biological simulation problems is described.