Fertile

How to spell fertile

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fertile

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fertile mean?

1. adjectiveCapable of producing abundant crops, offspring, or ideas.

Fertile in a sentence

• The valley has unusually fertile soil that yields two harvests a year.

• A quiet office can be surprisingly fertile ground for new ideas.

Where does fertile come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin fertilis, meaning 'fruitful' or 'productive', which was built on the verb ferre, 'to bear or carry'. The underlying idea is of land or a creature that bears or carries forth abundant produce, the same notion of 'carrying' that gives us words like 'transfer' and 'refer'. Latin fertilis passed into Old French as 'fertil' and from there into English in the early 1400s, first describing rich soil that yields heavy crops. From the agricultural sense it broadened to cover living things capable of producing offspring and, more figuratively, minds or situations rich in ideas. The single -t- and the -ile ending are worth noting, since the spelling stays the same on both sides of the Atlantic even though British and American speakers pronounce the final syllable quite differently.

How the word is built

• fert- (from ferre: to bear or carry)
• -ile (adjective suffix: capable of)