starve-acre
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.38 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Pertaining to or characteristic of unproductive, impoverished soil.
Example Sentences
- "Some sandy soils are much overrun with the wild radish (Raphanus raphanistrum), provincially called " rump," while the clays are swarmed with starve-acre (Ranunculus arvensis), and the clivers or burrs (Galium aparine), which are very troublesome to separate from the grain when winnowed."
- "It seems that a particularly tiresome form of rauunculus, well described by the nickname of “starve-acre," can be cxterminated with dressings of sulphate of ammonia, and that this method is equally efficacious in ridding land of the picturesque but unprofitable poppy. Where there is more starve-acre than grass, the farmer pays twice his nominal rent, and is otherwise wasting money by growing weeds on his pasture."
- "It is quite common for farmers to use cereal grains for seed which contain weed seeds, e.g. starve-acre (ranunculus arvensis), docks, wild oats, rye-like brome (bromus secolinus), etc."
- "There was no exaggeration in Marian's definition of Flintcomb-Ash farm as a starve-acre place."
- "They'd grown up together, had seen a lot of life, and were mostly inseparable, through six decades of raven, starve-acre days."
- "I suggest that he was instead thinking about his birthplace, where, for a while, those infants did live to inherit the earth, at least the mined-out, falling-down, starve-acre part of it that was the town of Hailey."
Usage
Inflected Forms
starveacre (alternative)
starve acre (alternative)
stave-acre (alternative)
stave acre (alternative)
more starve-acre (comparative)
most starve-acre (superlative)