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Fecund and its synonyms fruitful and fertile all mean producing or capable of producing offspring or fruit, literally or figuratively. Fecund applies to things that yield offspring, fruit, or results in abundance or with rapidity ("a fecund herd," "a fecund imagination"). Fruitful emphasizes abundance, too, and often adds the implication that the results attained are desirable or useful ("fruitful plains," "a fruitful discussion"). Fertile implies the power to reproduce ("a fertile egg") or the power to assist in reproduction, growth, or development ("fertile soil," "a fertile climate for artists").
Synonyms
Examples of fecund in a Sentence
Ana Karina Zatarain, The New Yorker, 24 Feb. 2024
Granting all perturbation and backsliding, generous lives had been lived on that fecund soil, and a generous spirit inhered in it.
—Marilynne Robinson, The New York Review of Books, 12 Oct. 2023
This also happened to be one of the most creatively fecund periods in the city’s history.
—Ned Resnikoff, The New Republic, 2 Sep. 2023
Older females were significantly less fecund than young mature females, and were not more fecund than subadult females.
—Seriously Science, Discover Magazine, 28 Feb. 2018
State officials say their own surveys put the figure at 0.89, a rate just above that of South Korea, the least fecund nation in the world.
—Sameer Yasir, New York Times, 29 May 2023
Sen worked in what was an extraordinarily fecund period for Bengali-language cinema, based in the eastern Indian film stronghold Calcutta (now Kolkata).
—Naman Ramachandran, Variety, 13 May 2023
There have been dozens more slamming the bureau for various transgressions, most of them figments of the fecund presidential imagination.
—Robert G. Kaiser, The New York Review of Books, 27 Feb. 2020
For example, France in the early 19th century was characterized by a situation of highly fecund Catholic immigrants arriving to reinforce the conservative Catholic faction among the native-born.
—Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 21 Oct. 2010
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'fecund.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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Cite this Entry
“Fecund.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fecund. Accessed 18 Apr. 2024.
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