What's the difference between barren and sterile?

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.

Sterile


Definition:

  • (a.) Producing little or no crop; barren; unfruitful; unproductive; not fertile; as, sterile land; a sterile desert; a sterile year.
  • (a.) Incapable of reproduction; unfitted for reproduction of offspring; not able to germinate or bear fruit; unfruitful; as, a sterile flower, which bears only stamens.
  • (a.) Free from reproductive spores or germs; as, a sterile fluid.
  • (a.) Fig.: Barren of ideas; destitute of sentiment; as, a sterile production or author.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Theoretical findings on sterilization and disinfection measures are useless for the dental practice if their efficiency is put into question due to insufficient consideration of the special conditions of dental treatment.
  • (2) Sterile, pruritic papules and papulopustules that formed annular rings developed on the back of a 58-year-old woman.
  • (3) Gamma-irradiated splenic homogenates of armadillos infected with M. leprae proved sterile by conventional tests and media.
  • (4) All of the rabbits immunized with FCA developed sterile subcutaneous abscesses.
  • (5) The disappearance of the herbicide, Avadex (40% diallate), from five agricultural soils (differing in either pH, carbon content, or nitrogen content), incubated under sterile and non-sterile conditions, was followed for a period of 20 weeks.
  • (6) During periods of wet steam it was impossible to maintain consistent sterility of the mouse pellets even using a cycle of 126 degrees C for 60 minutes.
  • (7) Following the hypothesis that infertile patients may present emotional conflicts with regard to the wish of having a child, psychodynamic interviews were carried out with 116 infertile couples concomitantly with their first consultation at the Sterility Department.
  • (8) Sterilization rates at the time of abortions increased with increasing age and with increasing gravidity, but the total rates, adjusted for age and gravidity of patients, have changed little in the past 15 years.
  • (9) It remains to be seen, whether the small number and sterility causes were coincidental or manifest themselves in future, especially, if the sterility concerned can be classified as idiopathic.
  • (10) The results of the study suggest that perhaps tobramycin of cefotaxime-impregnated PMMA beads would produce local levels of antibiotic high enough to sterilize a given dead space for a period of 28 days.
  • (11) A relationship between the level of sterility induced by juvenoids and reductions in nymph-to-adult ratios permitted formulation of a biological action threshold for regulating treatment.
  • (12) Using sterile conditions, antibodies to G were incubated with a suspension of transformed cells at 4 degrees C, unbound antibodies were then removed, and the cells were incubated with the immunoabsorbent (3 micron magnetic beads; J. Ugelstad et al.
  • (13) There is a certain degree of swagger, a sudden interruption of panache, as Alan Moore enters the rather sterile Waterstones office where he has agreed to speak to me.
  • (14) The antibacterial property was evaluated by the width and sterility of the clear zone in the bacterial culture plates.
  • (15) Three mouse models of male-limited, hybrid-type sterility are available: the sterility controlled by the T-t genetic complex, the hybrid sterility system including the Hst-1 gene, and the sterility of carriers of various chromosomal anomalies.
  • (16) The main cause of sterility was complete tubal occlusion in 65.6% of the cases due to a high incidence of pelvic inflammatory diseases in the investigated patients.
  • (17) Highly educated women are less likely than those with little education to elect sterilizations and more likely to rely on barrier methods.
  • (18) Among 137 consecutive patients who had a sterile body site cultured for mycobacteria within 3 months of their first AIDS-defining episode of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, median survival was significantly shorter in those with disseminated MAC infection (107 days; 95% confidence interval [CI] 55-179) than those with negative cultures (275 days; 95% CI 230-318; P less than .01), even after controlling for age, absolute lymphocyte count, and hemoglobin concentration.
  • (19) Factors of negligible importance prognostically were: complete sterilization at mammary and axillary level after radiotherapy, persistence of florid cancer tissue at mammary level and histiocytosis of the axillary lymph nodes.
  • (20) The teflon dish is re-usable, resistant to sterilization procedures, and easy to assemble.