Barren

How to spell barren

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce barren

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does barren mean?

1. adjectiveUnable to produce crops, vegetation, or offspring; bleak and empty.

Barren in a sentence

• The soil here is so barren that nothing will grow.

• After the drought the fields lay completely barren.

Where does barren come from?

Language of origin: French

Barren came into English in the 1200s from Old French 'baraigne' or 'brehaigne', an adjective meaning 'sterile' or 'unable to bear young', applied first to women and female animals that produced no offspring. The ultimate source of the Old French word is genuinely uncertain, and scholars have never settled on a confident root, which is part of why the spelling feels arbitrary. Over time the meaning widened from infertility in living creatures to unproductive land that grows nothing, and then further to anything bleak or empty, such as a barren room or a barren argument. The doubled -rr- and the -en ending are simply the form the word froze into in Middle English, and there is no helpful prefix or suffix to lean on. The trickiest trap is that it sounds exactly like 'baron', the noble title, even though the two words are completely unrelated in origin.

How the word is built

• barren (a single Old French root meaning 'sterile'; not built from a prefix or suffix, the double -rr- simply preserves the medieval spelling)

Words that sound like barren

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• baron: A nobleman holding the lowest rank of the hereditary peerage.