Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Not capable of being tilled or cultivated.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Not capable of cultivation

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective not suitable for cultivation or tilling

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

un- +‎ cultivable

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Examples

  • Much of the land allocated proved uncultivable - because it was affected by salinity; waterlogged, unleveled or had multiple ownership claims - which led to protracted legal battles.

    Caroline Gluck: HELPING THE LANDLESS BECOME LANDOWNERS 2010

  • In their undeveloped corner of the Himalayas, these people still dress in traditional tribal clothes, barter their produce and scratch a living from land that would be discarded as uncultivable in most Western countries.

    Daniel Keeler: The Big Green Gamble 2008

  • Elevation can modify soil quality, particularly in the case of a valley or depression (nkova) where the ground will retain humidity longer and so be productive even when land of the same soil type in a higher area is rendered uncultivable because of drought.

    Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

  • Mecca Valley described as an “uncultivable valley” Abraham 14/37 had an area of desert quality and its climate was hot and dry.

    Campaigning In The Bull Ring Praguetory 2007

  • With agriculture the backbone of socio-economic development on the continent, uncleared mines have rendered vast tracts of land uncultivable, said Chinamasa.

    ANC Daily News Briefing 1995

  • Though the pines themselves have not been planted much longer than a hundred years, they now appear as the only relics of a lonely and rather bare tract of uncultivable desert.

    Wanderings in Wessex An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter Edric Holmes

  • The great pine forests below were a cheerful contrast to the illimitable fields of ice and snow and uncultivable lands which they had so lately traversed.

    Doctor Jones' Picnic

  • For the sea, the uncultivable sea, as Homer calls it, is itself a road, whereas on earth, whether it be mountain or desert or field, roads have first painfully to be made.

    Progress and History Francis Sydney Marvin 1903

  • A thousand times that day, in the dark swamp, on the wide prairie, or under his rush-thatch on the lake-side, he tortured himself with one question: Why had she -- Zoséphine -- reached away out from Carancro to buy the uncultivable and primeval wilderness round about his lonely hiding-place?

    Bonaventure A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana George Washington Cable 1884

  • Cooper says: "We cannot say positively that any plant is uncultivable ANYWHERE until it has been tried;" and this seems to be even more true of wild than of domesticated vegetation.

    Earth as Modified by Human Action, The~ Chapter 02 (historical) 1874

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