WORD OF THE DAY: FECUND
adjective | FEK-und
What It Means
Fecund is a formal word that typically describes a person, animal, or plant that is producing or able to produce many offspring. It is synonymous with fertile and fruitful. Fecund is also used figuratively to describe something especially intellectually productive or inventive, as in “a fecund source of ideas.”
// The farm’s fecund fields abounded with produce.
// The Franklin stove, bifocals, and the lightning rod are just a few of the inventions that we owe to the fecund creativity of Benjamin Franklin.
Examples of FECUND
“By 2020, Sarai had started to resent her bucolic upbringing, but the pandemic forced her to become reacquainted with the landscape of El Llano. In several of the book’s photographs, she appears engulfed by it almost entirely—submerged from the nose down in deep turquoise water or climbing up into the dense foliage of a tree. Others omit her altogether, capturing the natural realm unblemished by human presence, a fecund environment dotted with snakes and birds and fungi.” — Ana Karina Zatarain, The New Yorker, 24 Feb. 2024
Did You Know?
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.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary