"barren" in the noun sense
1. barren, waste, wasteland
an uninhabited wilderness that is worthless for cultivation
"the barrens of central Africa"
"the trackless wastes of the desert"
"barren" in the adjective sense
1. bare, barren, bleak, desolate, stark
providing no shelter or sustenance
"bare rocky hills"
"barren lands"
"the bleak treeless regions of the high Andes"
"the desolate surface of the moon"
"a stark landscape"
2. barren
not bearing offspring
"a barren woman"
"learned early in his marriage that he was sterile"
3. barren, destitute, devoid, free, innocent
completely wanting or lacking
"writing barren of insight"
"young recruits destitute of experience"
"innocent of literary merit"
"the sentence was devoid of meaning"
Source: WordNet® (An amazing lexical database of English)
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