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Fecund has been flourishing in the English language and describing fructuous things since the 15th century. It ultimately made its way into the English lexicon through the Latin adjective fecundus, meaning "fruitful." Fecund applies to things that yield offspring or fruit or results in abundance or with rapidity, as in "a fecund herd" or "a fecund imagination." Its synonyms fruitful and fertile also describe things that produce or are capable of producing offspring or fruit, literally or figuratively. Fruitful emphasizes abundance, too, often with the added implication that the results attained are desirable or useful ("fruitful plains," "a fruitful discussion"), while 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"). Fecund is a tad more literary and formal than either of these synonyms.
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
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Cite this Entry
“Fecund.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fecund. Accessed 1 Dec. 2024.
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