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  1. sparse love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. adj. Occurring, growing, or settled at widely spaced intervals; not thick or dense.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. Thinly scattered; dispersed round about; existing at considerable intervals; as used of population or the like, not dense.
  2. In botany, scattered; placed distantly or irregularly without any apparent or regular order: applied to branches, leaves, peduncles, etc.
  3. In zoology, spare or remote, as spots or other markings: scattered irregularly; few or scanty, as hairs or other appendages.
  4. To disperse; scatter.

Wiktionary

  1. adj. Having widely spaced intervals.
  2. adj. Not dense; meager.
  3. v. obsolete To scatter; to disperse.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. adj. Thinly scattered; set or planted here and there; not being dense or close together.
  2. adj. (Bot.) Placed irregularly and distantly; scattered; -- applied to branches, leaves, peduncles, and the like.
  3. v. obsolete To scatter; to disperse.

WordNet 3.0

  1. adj. not dense

Etymologies

  1. From Latin sparsus. (Wiktionary)
  2. Latin sparsus, past participle of spargere, to scatter. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

  • “He said the court's order, which he described as "sparse," potentially leaves the door open for the governor to return with a more-specific letter spelling out reasons for removal.”

    The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com

  • “Heaps may be the favorite, though Nelson -- who mostly handed off or ran in sparse duty last season -- has the experience edge and also may have the confidence of current players.”

    BYU - Team Notes

  • “I chatted with a DNR wildlife biologist responsible for NW GA a couple of weeks ago looking for hogs and he advised that they remain sparse in that section of the state.”

    This is probably a more regional question than most; but is there a place in NW GA with good hog hunting?

  • “It's a piece of quiet virtuosity — Carter spends more time than most composers would exploring the instrument's low range, and much of the middle sections, both slow and fast, are an exercise in sparse lontano orchestration, the interplay between horn and orchestra seeming to come from very far away.”

    Magna Carter (8): You've got a head start

  • “M.I.A. Hip-hop electro, Jamaican dancehall, Brazilian baile funk, South Asian bhangra — Maya Arulpragasam, better known as M.I.A., draws on all of them in sparse, noisy, low-fi groove tracks that sound like they come from some imagined third world street.”

    CMJ Music Marathon - ArtsBeat Blog - NYTimes.com

  • “We spent the rest of the day experimenting with a swim frog in sparse patches, which produced several chases and a couple of bites.”

    Learn to Become a Bass Fishing Pro

  • “Thank you for the review, March mentioned you'd done this - I agree with all re the previous ones - minimal, coldness are excellent descriptions - I used the word sparse earlier to March.”

    Perfume Review: Ineke Evening Edged in Gold

  • “Properties in this sense are sometimes called sparse properties, as opposed to abundant properties (the distinction between sparse and abundant properties comes from Lewis 1983).”

    Nominalism in Metaphysics

  • “Sometimes in sparse cover she would lie out flat on her point which setters did earlier in their tradition and when she had to reposition she would often crawl very quickly on her belly.”

    Jim Harrison: The Life of a Sportsman and the Lives of his Dogs

  • “Busha’s Lines On Lake Winnebago is a reflection on life in sparse, conversational language.”

    March « 2010 « poetry dispatch & other notes from the underground

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synonyms (5)

Words with the same meaning

  1. scattered
  1. scatter
  1. disperse
  1. infrequent
  1. few

equivalents (1)

Other words for ‘sparse’

  1. distributed

same context (19)

Words that are found in similar contexts

  1. scanty
  2. bushy
  3. luxuriant
  1. dense
  2. close-cropped
  3. wispy
  1. feathery
  2. curly
  3. silky
  1. wiry
  2. reddish
  3. sandy
  1. unkempt
  2. scrubby
  3. spiky
  1. brittle
  2. fluffy
  3. leafy
  1. thorny

rhymes (4)

Words with the same terminal sound

  1. carse
  1. farce
  1. marse
  1. parse

reverse dictionary (38)

Words that contain this word in their definition

  1. sparsely
  2. scattery
  3. semidesert
  4. sparsate
  5. sparseness
  6. sparsile
  7. sparsity
  1. conflect
  2. motivic
  3. quotation
  4. scrubland
  5. scrabbled
  6. thin out
  7. tillandsia
  1. tillandsia usneoides
  2. pick-haired
  3. pyrularia pubera
  4. rabbitwood
  5. scantily
  6. smoke tree
  7. Spanish moss
  1. desert
  2. thin
  3. dalea spinosa
  4. genus tillandsia
  5. long moss
  6. Nullarbor Plain
  7. old man's beard
  1. barely
  2. black moss
  3. buffalo nut
  4. scatter
  5. diffuse
  6. rare
  7. remote
  1. scattering
  2. spare
  3. caatinga

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Comments

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  • kmassie From the book The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. pg.148
    "To my left and back,sparse piney woods." Nov 29, 2010

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‘sparse’ has been looked up 2197 times, loved by 1 person, added to 34 lists, commented on 1 time, and has a Scrabble score of 8.