WILDERNESS • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Wilderness

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/wˈɪldərnəs/ Listen

noun

Wilderness n.

A tract of land, or a region, uncultivated and uninhabited by human beings, whether a forest or a wide, barren plain; a wild; a waste; a desert; a pathless waste of any kind. "The wat'ry wilderness yields no supply."

A disorderly or neglected place.

Quality or state of being wild; wildness. (Obs.) "These paths and bowers doubt not but our joint hands. Will keep from wilderness with ease."

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Etymology of 'Wilderness'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Wilderness" Quotes from Famous Books

... her deprecation of their praise, waited with the others until the two guides were ready. Then, in the same order as before, they moved forward, descended the slope, and came into a strange wilderness of stark gray alders that stretched away in every direction. And threading, circling, crossing each other everywhere among the alders ran the trails of deer and wild boar, deep and fresh in the ...

— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers

... could do but take her to my mother as quickly as possible. There was a wilderness of hills to cross before we struck the trail through Mohawk Valley. That afternoon the snow began to fall in great dry flakes, thickening steadily. The girl walked when she could, but most of the time I carried her. I had the power of a Shaman, though the Holder of the Heavens ...

— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al

... returning boat and sat, filled with pleasant fatigue, against the rail in the bow, listening to the Italians' fiddle and harp. Blinker had thrown off all care. The North Woods seemed to him an uninhabitable wilderness. What a fuss he had made over signing his name—pooh! he could sign it a hundred times. And her name was as pretty as she was—"Florence," he said it to himself a ...

— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... earthly; then the tents came sharply into focus, and after them the ring of impenetrable trees. The trees whispered a chorus, myriads strong, in a chromatic scale that sang but faintly of the open country. There were palpable miles of wilderness, and none other lodge but this, yet the psychological necessity for escape was stronger in Vanheimert than the bodily reluctance to leave the insecure security of the bushrangers' encampment. He was their prisoner, whatever they might say, and the sense of captivity ...

— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung

... slavery beyond the sea and the mountains. Such incessant alarms must annihilate the pleasures and interrupt the labors of a rural life; and the Campagna of Rome was speedily reduced to the state of a dreary wilderness, in which the land is barren, the waters are impure, and the air is infectious. Curiosity and ambition no longer attracted the nations to the capital of the world: but, if chance or necessity directed the steps of a ...

— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

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