sere
/sɪ(ə)ɹ/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.16 in modern English
4
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
3
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A natural succession community of organisms in an ecosystem, especially a series of communities succeeding one another from a time when habitat is unoccupied or disturbed to the time when a climax community is achieved.
Example Sentences
- "The autumn winds rushing / Waft the leaves that are searest, / But our flower was in flushing, / When blighting was nearest."
- "[T]he recitation of Border Minstrelsy, or a well-sung ballad, served to revive the sere and yellow leaf of age by their refreshing memories of the pleasurable past."
- "Perhaps it is the scant, delicate detail revealing finer lines, which thus turns corners of Tuscany into an imaginary Hellas. Or perhaps the mere sunny austerity of these rocky sere places, the twitter of birds telling of renewed life, suggesting what, to us, seem the homes of the world's happy youth."
- "[…] a blighted land / More wasted, serer than before."
- "Except for their crawlers, and a crow flickering past in the mist, nothing moved: the grass was sere and golden, the dirt beneath white and gravelly."
- "Our talk had been serious and sober, But our thoughts they were palsied and sere— Our memories were treacherous and sere—"
Etymology
From Middle English ser, sere, seare, seer, seere, seir, seyr (“dry, withered; emaciated, shrivelled; brittle; bare; dead, lifeless; barren, useless”), from Old English sēar, sīere (“dry, withered; barren; sere”), from Proto-West Germanic *sauʀ(ī), from Proto-Germanic *sauzaz (“dry, parched”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂sews-, *sh₂ews- (“to be dry”). Cognate with Dutch zoor (“dry and coarse”), Greek αὖος (ávos, “dry”), Lithuanian sausas (“dry”), Middle Low German sôr (Low German soor (“arid, dry”)), Old Church Slavonic соухъ (suχŭ, “dry”). Doublet of sear and sare.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /sɪ(ə)ɹ/
- British English: /sɪə/
Usage
- Archaic
- Literary
- Obsolete
- British usage
- Uncountable
Inflected Forms
serer (comparative)
serest (superlative)
seres (plural)
more sere (comparative)
most sere (superlative)
seer (alternative)