fertile

[fur-tl, -tahyl] / ˈfɜr tl, -taɪl /

ADJECTIVE

ready to bear, produce

Synonyms

STRONGEST

abundant arable fruitful lush productive rich

WEAK

bearing black bountiful breeding breedy bringing forth childbearing childing fecund feracious flowering flowing with milk and honey generative gravid hebetic loamy luxuriant plenteous plentiful pregnant procreant producing proliferant prolific puberal pubescent rank spawning teeming uberous vegetative virile with child yielding

Antonyms

STRONGEST

barren impotent sparse unfruitful unproductive

WEAK

fruitless infertile sterile useless

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

But the land was fertile, and the Native Americans told of even richer soil to the east, ideal for encomiendas, as large Spanish-ruled plantations exploiting indigenous labor were called.

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 28, 2026

Efforts failed to contain the herd's growth, with a lack of predators and the fertile and swampy Antioquia region providing perfect conditions for the native African animal to thrive.

From BBC • Apr. 28, 2026

Add to that Hurricane Melissa, which struck the island nation in October 2025, flooding fertile farmland and destroying crops.

From Salon • Apr. 11, 2026

The researchers then bred the mice and confirmed that they were fertile.

From Science Daily • Apr. 7, 2026

Thales brought back from Babylon and Egypt the seeds of the new sciences of astronomy and geometry, sciences that would sprout and grow in the fertile soil of Ionia.

From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan

Vocabulary lists containing fertile

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Word Generation Social Studies - Ancient Civilizations of Egypt, Greece, Rome

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Mesopotamia - Introductory

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