pure
Pluralpures
- 1Being nothing more than what is named; mere; sheer and unmixed with anything else.
Bumping into my old roommate at a tiny airport in Lisbon was pure chance.
The supposed memoir turned out to be pure fiction.
UsageGoes before the noun: pure luck, pure chance, pure nonsense, pure fiction.
- 2Free of foreign material or contaminants; consisting of a single substance.
Chemists distilled the sample repeatedly until it was chemically pure.
The jeweler confirmed the bar was pure gold, with no other metals mixed in.
UsageCompares freely: purer air, the purest water.
Similarunadulterated, unalloyed, undiluted, uncontaminated
Oppositeimpure, contaminated, adulterated, mixed
Note
Latin pūrus meant "clean, free from dirt, unmixed, plain," and this sense keeps the "unmixed" core most literally. Isaac Watts put it plainly in his Logick: a guinea is pure gold if it holds no alloy. The "plain" strand lives on in the "nothing but" meaning.
Checked 3 Nov 2026 · 2 facts
- Latin pūrus meant clean, free from dirt, unmixed, and plain. en.wiktionary.org
- Isaac Watts wrote Logick and used the guinea example to explain purity. en.wiktionary.org
- 3
- 4Said of an animal or plant whose ancestry comes from one breed, strain or line alone, never crossed with another.
Only pure Arabian horses may be entered in the breed show.
Growers keep the strain pure by never planting it near other varieties of corn.
UsageFor animals, purebred is more usual: a purebred Labrador. Growers keep a line pure.
Similarpurebred, thoroughbred
Oppositecrossbred, hybrid, mixed
Note
Keeping a plant line pure means preventing cross-pollination with other lines, which is why corn growers separate their varieties in the field.
Checked 2 Nov 2026 · 2 facts
- Maintaining a plant line's purity involves preventing crossing with other lines. ucanr.edu
- Corn varieties are separated to avoid cross-pollination. extension.okstate.edu
- 5Free of flaws or imperfections; unspoiled and unblemished.
The diamond was prized for its pure, flawless clarity.
He admired the pure, unbroken lines of the old wooden boat.
Similarflawless, perfect, unblemished, immaculate, pristine
- 6Pursued for its own sake or for the sake of knowledge, rather than for practical application.
He moved from applied engineering into pure research, chasing questions with no immediate payoff.
Pure mathematics studies abstract structures without concern for whether they describe anything real.
UsageSet against applied: pure versus applied mathematics, pure research.
Similartheoretical, abstract, basic, fundamental
- 7
Less common meanings
- 8A person or thing that is free of impurity or moral fault.
Only the pure, the old legends claimed, could touch the sacred relic.
She wrote of the pure as those left untouched by greed.
Note
Turned into a noun, the adjective works as both a count noun and a mass noun. Christopher Leigh Connery's The Empire of the Text (1998) can speak of a narrative of the "pures," with a plural. D. K. Gavan's Rocky Road to Dublin has "took a drop of the pure," where the pure is something poured and drunk to keep the spirits up.
Checked 31 Oct 2026 · 5 facts
- Pure can be a count noun or a mass noun. en.wiktionary.org
- Christopher Leigh Connery wrote The Empire of the Text, first published in 1998. bloomsbury.com
- Connery's book uses the plural pures in the phrase narrative of the pures. en.wiktionary.org
- D. K. Gavan wrote the words of Rocky Road to Dublin. en.wikipedia.org
- The song contains took a drop of the pure, referring to a drink taken to sustain the narrator's spirits. en.wikipedia.org
- 9Of a vowel or consonant, having a single, simple sound.
Phoneticians describe the Italian /e/ as a pure vowel, without the glide English speakers tend to add.
Spanish has pure vowels, so 'no' ends on a steady 'o' with no English-style glide.
Note
A phonetician's term for a sound that holds one quality from start to finish. A pure vowel is a monophthong, with no glide toward a second vowel along the way. A pure consonant is unaspirated, released without a following puff of breath. The natural opposites are diphthong for vowels and aspirated for consonants, and keeping those pairs in mind is the quickest way to use the term precisely.
Checked 31 Oct 2026 · 4 facts
- A pure vowel is a monophthong with a stable quality and no glide toward another vowel. ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in
- Pure can describe an unaspirated consonant. www11.ihp.sinica.edu.tw
- An unaspirated release lacks the following burst of breath associated with aspiration. en.wikipedia.org
- The relevant contrasts are monophthong versus diphthong and unaspirated versus aspirated. www11.ihp.sinica.edu.tw
- 10Especially in golf, to strike the ball with perfectly clean contact and complete accuracy.
On the final hole, he pured a seven-iron that stopped three feet from the pin.
Tour pros seem to pure the ball on almost every swing, even under pressure.
UsageForms: pures, puring, pured. Mostly golf talk: pure a drive or an iron.
Note
Golf turned the adjective into a verb for the perfect strike: to pure a shot is to catch it so cleanly and squarely that it goes exactly where it was aimed.
Checked 3 Nov 2026 · 1 fact
- Golf uses pure as a verb for a well-struck shot. stlouisgolflessons.com
- 11To a great extent or degree, making the adjective that follows much stronger.
I was pure raging when the bus drove straight past the stop.
The shops were pure packed on Saturday afternoon.
Similarreally, totally, completely, absolutely, utterly
Note
A spoken intensifier of Scotland and Liverpool, doing the job of really or very: pure busy, pure shy. Trainspotting (1996) has "I just get pure shy with the interviewer cats."
Checked 2 Nov 2026 · 1 fact
- The film Trainspotting was released in 1996. miramax.com
- 12In Bermudian slang, a lot of; many or much, used before a noun.
Me and my cousins used to play pure cards on the porch till late.
She still had pure work to finish before the weekend.
Note
Bermudian slang that goes straight before a noun, doing the work of a lot of or loads of: pure cards, pure work. The Bermuda Sun printed it in 2013 in a childhood memory of playing "pure crazy 8s and spades" by candlelight. Outsiders can misread it: pure traffic means plenty of traffic, not traffic of one unmixed kind.
Checked 2 Nov 2026 · 3 facts
- Pure is recorded as Bermudian slang meaning 'a lot of'. en.wiktionary.org
- The Bermuda Sun published the quoted material in 2013. bermudasun.bm
- The quotation describes playing crazy eights and spades by candlelight when younger, and includes the exact words quoted. bermudasun.bm
- 13To clean something, or to refine it by removing impurities.
Note
An old verb that simply put the adjective to work: to pure something was to make it pure by cleansing or refining it. The fit runs deep, since the Latin word behind it traces to a root meaning "to cleanse, purify." Because the use is obsolete, it belongs in historical writing. The verb a modern reader meets is the golfer's clean strike, which has nothing to do with cleaning.
Checked 3 Nov 2026 · 3 facts
- The historical verb pure meant to cleanse or refine something. en.wiktionary.org
- Pure ultimately comes from Latin pūrus, whose ancestral root means “to cleanse, purify.” en.wiktionary.org
- The cleansing or refining sense of the verb is obsolete. en.wiktionary.org
Showing meanings only.
Practice
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Origin
Latin pūrus ("clean, free from dirt, unmixed, plain") goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *pewH- ("to cleanse, purify"). It reached Middle English as pure by way of Old French pur. The word pushed aside several native Middle English words, such as lutter, skere, and schir.
Checked 1 Nov 2026 · 4 facts
- Latin pūrus means clean, free from dirt, unmixed, plain. en.wiktionary.org
- Latin pūrus derives ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *pewH-, meaning to cleanse or purify. en.wiktionary.org
- The word entered Middle English as pure through Old French pur, from Latin pūrus. en.wiktionary.org
- Pure displaced native Middle English words including lutter, skere, and schir. en.wiktionary.org