Word.ws English Dictionary

pure

UK/ˈpjʊə/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

British/ˈpjɵː/

pure adjective: free of flaws or imperfections; unsullied. Also the alternative form of puer.

Adjective

pure (comparative purer or more pure, superlative purest or most pure)

  1. Free of flaws or imperfections; unsullied.
    • Such was the origin of a friendship as warm and pure as any that ancient or modern history records.1849–1861, Thomas Babington Macaulay, chapter VII, in The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, volume (please specify |volume=I to V), London: Longman, Brown, Green, and...
  2. Free of foreign material or pollutants.
    • A guinea is pure gold if it has in it no alloy.1725, Isaac Watts, Logick: Or, The Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth, […], 2nd edition, London: […] John Clark and Richard Hett, […], Emanuel Matthews, […], and Richard Ford, […]...
    • As for the rest, the air here is said to be purer than elsewhere in Ireland; the water of the Nore is beautifully transparent; and the bogless state of the land helps out the rhyme.1837, Leitch Ritchie, Ireland Picturesque and Romantic, volume 1, page 225
  3. Free of immoral behavior or qualities; clean.
    • Laye hondes sodenly on no man nether be part taker of wother mens synnes. Kepe thy silfe pure.1526, [William Tyndale, transl.], The Newe Testamẽt […] (Tyndale Bible), [Worms, Germany: Peter Schöffer], →OCLC, 1 Timothy v:[22], folio cclxxviij, recto
  4. Mere; that and that only.
    • That idea is pure madness!
    Synonyms:
    alone, bare, only, simple, very
  5. Done for its own sake instead of serving another branch of science.
    • The [Isaac] Newton that emerges from the [unpublished] manuscripts is far from the popular image of a rational practitioner of cold and pure reason. The architect of modern science was himself not very modern. He was obsessed with alchemy.2014 June 21, “Magician’s brain”, in The Economist, volume 411, number 8892
    Antonyms:
    applied
  6. Of a single, simple sound or tone; said of some vowels and the unaspirated consonants.
  7. Without harmonics or overtones; not harsh or discordant.
  8. Having no side effects.
    • a pure method
  9. (slang, Bermuda) A lot of.
    • Well when ah's youngah, ah'd just light a candle rahn de dinna table play pure crazy 8s and spades vif my brotha til we lot dozed off...2013 April 12, “Exclusive: Meet Derpuntae - Bermuda's first meme”, in The Bermuda Sun, archived from the original on 12 Dec 2022

Adverb

pure (not comparable)

  1. (Scotland, Liverpool) to a great extent or degree; extremely; exceedingly.
    • You’re pure busy.
    • I just get pure shy with the interview cats.1996, Trainspotting (film)

Verb

pure (third-person singular simple present pures, present participle puring, simple past and past participle pured)

  1. To hit (the ball) completely cleanly and accurately.
    • Tiger Woods pured his first drive straight down the middle of the fairway.
  2. (obsolete, transitive) To cleanse; to refine.

Noun

pure (countable and uncountable, plural pures)

  1. One who, or that which, is pure.
    • ... the establishment of an inferior College, and the consequent connexion of the many thousands of British practitioners in medicine and surgery with a subordinate institution, and one that should be subservient to the government of the pures.1845, The Lancet, page 187
    • Took a drop of the pure, to keep my spirits from sinking, […]c. 1870, D. K. Gavan, Rocky Road to Dublin

Also used as

pure is also the alternative form of puer.

pure meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Sanskrit

pure in Hindi

free of flaws or imperfections
शुद्ध śuddh, ख़ालिस xālis, विमल vimal
free of foreign material or pollutants
शुद्ध śuddh

pure in Tamil

free of foreign material or pollutants
தூய tūya
free of immoral behavior or qualities; clean
வெள்ளை veḷḷai, தூய tūya
extremely
மிகவும் mikavum

pure in Marathi

free of foreign material or pollutants
शुद्ध śuddha

pure in Sanskrit

free of flaws or imperfections
चौक्ष caukṣa
free of foreign material or pollutants
पावक pāvaka
More languagesFewer languages
pure in Tagalog
tagnas
pure in Arabic
صَافٍ ṣāfin, اَلصَّافِي aṣ-ṣāfī, نَقِيّ naqiyy
pure in Malay
tulen
pure in Persian
پاک pâk, ناب nâb, محض mahz
pure in Thai
บริสุทธิ์ bɔɔ-rí-sùt, บุญ bun
pure in Vietnamese
thuần khiết

Examples of pure in a sentence

  • "Hetch Hetchy water is the purest, wholly unpolluted, and forever unpollutable."1908 January 4, John Muir, “The Hetch Hetchy Valley”, in Sierra Club Bulletin, volume VI, number 4:
  • I will show in chapter 3 that, since the "pures" possibly did not even exist […]1998, Christopher Leigh Connery, The Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China, Rowman & Littlefield, →ISBN, page...

All 40 example sentences with pure

Synonyms of pure

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Antonyms

10 more antonymsFewer antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of pure

Forms of pure

Adjective
comparativepurer
comparativemore pure
superlativepurest
superlativemost pure
Verb
third-person singular presentpures
present participlepuring
past participlepured
pastpured
Noun
pluralpures

Origin of pure

From Middle English pure, pur, from Old French pur, from Latin pūrus (“clean, free from dirt or filth, unmixed, plain”), from Proto-Indo-European *pewH- (“to cleanse, purify”). Displaced native Middle English lutter (“pure, clear, sincere”) (from Old English hlūtor, hluttor), Middle English skere (“pure, sheer, clear”) (from Old English scǣre and Old Norse skǣr), Middle English schir (“clear, pure”) (from Old English scīr), Middle English smete, smeate (“pure, refined”) (from Old English smǣte; compare Old English mǣre (“pure”)).

Words formed from pure

Phrases with pure

5 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with pure

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about pure

What does pure mean?
Pure means free of flaws or imperfections; unsullied.
What is pure in Hindi?
Pure in Hindi is शुद्ध (śuddh), ख़ालिस (xālis), विमल (vimal). See Pure meaning in Hindi.
How do you use pure in a sentence?
"Hetch Hetchy water is the purest, wholly unpolluted, and forever unpollutable."
What part of speech is pure?
Pure can be an adjective, an adverb, a verb or a noun.
How do you pronounce pure?
Pure is pronounced /ˈpjʊə/ (UK).

Words near pure in the dictionary

  1. Purdues
  2. Purdum
  3. Purdums
  4. purdy
  5. Purdys
  6. pure
  7. pure air
  8. pure and simple
  9. pure as driven snow
  10. pure as the driven
  11. pure as the driven snow

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pure (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-pure.ogg.

Cite this entry: “pure.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pure. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.