barren
Empty and bare, where nothing can grow.
- Not a single flower grew on the barren, rocky hillside.
- The astronauts stared out at the barren surface of the Moon, where nothing at all grew.
Similar: bare, empty, lifeless
barren or desolate?
Barren is about nothing growing. Desolate is about loneliness and emptiness.
Both words paint a picture of an empty landscape, which is why children use them as a pair. But they describe different kinds of emptiness.
Barren is a fact about the land. A rocky hillside where not a single flower grows is barren, and so is a patch of the school field where the soil is too poor for grass. It is a plain description and does not have to be sad.
Desolate is a feeling as much as a place. An empty seaside town in winter, with the shops boarded up for the season and nobody on the pier, is desolate, even though grass grows perfectly well there. The word makes the reader feel the loneliness. People can be desolate too, meaning deeply unhappy, which a place called barren never suggests.
Both words, side by side
desolate
Empty, lonely and sad, with nothing and nobody in it.
- The desolate planet had no trees, no water and no sound at all.
- In midwinter the seaside funfair stood desolate, its rides empty and its stalls boarded up.
Similar: deserted, barren, bleak
Why it costs marks
Questions about the mood or atmosphere of a setting often hinge on words like these. Desolate is doing emotional work for the writer, while barren is mostly describing the ground. Spotting which one a writer chose helps a child explain how the setting is meant to feel.
Definitions and example sentences on this page are the ones a child sees inside Wordrealm, taken from our list of over 1,100 words. It is free to browse, with nothing to sign up for.
Sitting the 11+ in Kent, Medway or Buckinghamshire?
Plain-English guides to each test, from the councils’ own pages: Kent Test · Medway Test · Bucks Secondary Transfer Test