Fecundity

By Deane Barker • tags: definition •
Updates
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Definition: producing or capable of producing offspring; prolific

Another word for “fertility.” It also means someone with great creative output.

Why I Looked It Up

I encountered the word in the novel Cutting for Stone.

Their gazes were flat […] noting the gap between her first and second toe which everyone knows is the only reliable gauge of fecundity.

In this context, it means when a woman has reached child-bearing age (or, given the wording here, when she is capable of having sex).

I also found at roughly the same time in Extra Life in relation to the productivity of soil:

In the right circumstances, it could be capable of staggering fecundity…

Update

I didn’t note the book, but I have a picture of a book page which reads:

Our essential role is to produce ever more sophisticated tools – to “fecundate” machines as bees fecundate plants – until technology has developed the capacity to reproduce itself on its own.

(I wish I remembered the book, because this is a very depressing thought.)

Links from this – Cutting for Stone September 21, 2021
Absolutely stunning novel. I had heard of the book for years. My mother was born in Ethiopia in the 1940s (my grandparents were missionaries from New Zealand), and several people had told me that the story in the novel resembled my mother’s experience there as a child. The book was purchased for me...