Word.ws English Dictionary

sere

/sɪə/US/sɪ(ə)ɹ/

sere adjective: without moisture; dry.

Adjective (1)

sere (comparative serer, superlative serest)

  1. (archaic, literary, poetic) Without moisture; dry.
    • The autumn winds rushing / Waft the leaves that are searest, / But our flower was in flushing, / When blighting was nearest.1810, Walter Scott, “Canto III. The Gathering.”, in The Lady of the Lake; […], Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for John Ballantyne and Co.; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, and...
    • [T]he recitation of Border Minstrelsy, or a well-sung ballad, served to revive the sere and yellow leaf of age by their refreshing memories of the pleasurable past.1868, Henry Lonsdale, “The Græmes, Grames, or Grahams of the Borders”, in The Worthies of Cumberland. The Right Honourable Sir J[ames] R[obert] G[eorge] Graham, Bart. of Netherby, London: George...
  2. (archaic, literary, poetic) Of thoughts, etc.: barren, fruitless.
    • Our talk had been serious and sober,
      But our thoughts they were palsied and sere—
      Our memories were treacherous and sere—1847, Edgar Allan Poe, Ulalume: A Ballad
  3. (obsolete) Of fabrics: threadbare, worn out.
    • The roaring wind! it roar'd far off, / It did not come anear; / But with its sound it shook the sails / That were so thin and sere.1797–1798 (date written), [Samuel Taylor Coleridge], “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere”, in Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, London: […] J[ohn] & A[rthur] Arch, […], published 1798, →OCLC...

Noun (1)

sere (plural seres)

  1. A natural succession community of organisms in an ecosystem, especially a series of communities succeeding one another from a time when habitat is unoccupied or disturbed to the time when a climax community is achieved.
    • We examined one of several seres found in the middle Rocky Mountains that progress from a subalpine or montane forb-dominated meadow to a climax forest dominated by Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii).1980 August, Douglas C. Andersen, James A. MacMahon, Michael L. Wolfe, “Herbivorous Mammals along a Montane Sere: Community Structure and Energetics”, in Journal of Mammology, volume 61, number 3...
    • [C]ommunity types may represent either climax plant associations or successional communities within a sere.1988 December, Walter F. Mueggler, “Approach”, in Aspen Community Types of the Intermountain Region (General Technical Report; INT-250), Ogden, Ut.: Intermountain Research Station, Forest Service...
    Synonyms:
    seral community

Noun (2)

sere (plural seres)

  1. (obsolete) A claw, a talon.
    • Her [Minerva's] seres struck through Achilles' tent, and closely she instill'd / Heaven's most-to-be-desired feast to his great breast, and fill'd / His sinews with that sweet supply, for fear unsavoury fast / Should creep into his knees.[1611?], Homer, “Book XIX”, in Geo[rge] Chapman, transl., The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poets. […], London: […] Nathaniell Butter, →OCLC; republished as The Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets, […], new...

Adjective (2)

sere (comparative more sere, superlative most sere)

  1. (UK, dialectal, obsolete) Individual, separate, set apart.
    • Therefore I have ſeene good ſhooters [archers] which would have for everye bowe a ſere caſe, made of wullen clothe, and then you maye putte three or four of them ſo caſed, into a lether caſe if you will.1544 (date written; published 1571), Roger Ascham, Toxophilus, the Schole, or Partitions, of Shooting. […], London: […] Thomas Marshe, →OCLC; republished in The English Works of Roger Ascham, […]...
  2. (UK, dialectal, obsolete) Different; diverse.
    • Thou wert well-nee moidered [footnote: Distracted.] wi' me, I know, but it thou'd telled me, Mary, I mun do better or else we mun goo our sere-ways [footnote: Different ways.], belike I should a done better. I'm nobbut a mon, Mary, a lundy day-tale mon [footnote: Clumsy day-labourer.].1910, James Prior, “Bishoped Porridge”, in Fortuna Chance, London: Constable & Co. Ltd., →OCLC, page 316

Noun (3) capitalized: SERE

US/sɪɚ/UK/sɪə̯(ɹ)/

SERE (uncountable)

  1. (abbreviation, acronym) Acronym of survival, evasion, resistance, and escape (“training to prepare Western forces to survive when evading or captured”).

Proper noun capitalized: Sere

Sere

  1. A proposed language family of Ubangian languages spoken in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Examples of sere in a sentence

  • Or perhaps the mere sunny austerity of these rocky sere places, the twitter of birds telling of renewed life, suggesting what, to us, seem the homes of the world's happy youth.1905, Vernon Lee [pseudonym; Violet Paget], The Enchanted Woods and Other Essays on the Genius of Places, London; New York, N.Y.: John...
  • […] a blighted land / More wasted, serer than before.1979, Pintíg: Sa Malamig Na Bakal: Lifepulse in Cold Steel: Poems and Letters from Philippine Prisons, Hong Kong: Resource Centre for...
  • Except for their crawlers, and a crow flickering past in the mist, nothing moved: the grass was sere and golden, the dirt beneath white and gravelly.1984, Vernor Vinge, “The Peace War”, in Stanley Schmidt, editor, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, volume 104, New York, N.Y.: Davis...
  • [S]ome communities persisted as repeating early successional seres ("disclimaxes"), while climax communities could contain small areas of different sere communities.2007, Thomas J. Stohlgren, “History and Background, Baggage and Direction”, in Measuring Plant Diversity: Lessons from the Field, Oxford...

Synonyms of sere

3 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of sere

Forms of sere

Adjective
comparativeserer
superlativeserest
comparativemore sere
superlativemost sere
alternative formseer
Noun
pluralseres

Origin of sere

From Middle English ser, sere, seare, seer, seere, seir, seyr (“dry, withered; emaciated, shrivelled; brittle; bare; dead, lifeless; barren, useless”), from Old English sēar, sīere (“dry, withered; barren; sere”), from Proto-West Germanic *sauʀ(ī), from Proto-Germanic *sauzaz (“dry, parched”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂sews-, *sh₂ews- (“to be dry”). Cognate with Dutch zoor (“dry and coarse”), Greek αὖος (ávos, “dry”), Lithuanian sausas (“dry”), Middle Low German sôr (Low German soor (“arid, dry”)), Old Church Slavonic соухъ (suχŭ, “dry”). Doublet of sear and sare.

From Latin serere, present active infinitive of serō (“to entwine, interlace, link together; to join in a series, string together”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ser- (“to bind, tie together; to thread”).

From Old French serre (modern French serre (“talon”)), from serrer (“to grip tightly; to shut”) (modern French serrer (“to squeeze; to tighten”)), from Vulgar Latin serrāre (“to close, shut”), from Late Latin serāre, present active infinitive of serō (“to fasten with a bolt; to bar, bolt”), from sera (“bar for fastening doors”), from serō (“to bind or join together; entwine, interlace, interweave, plait”); see further at etymology 2.

Words formed from sere

Words that rhyme with sere

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about sere

What does sere mean?
Sere means without moisture; dry.
How do you use sere in a sentence?
Or perhaps the mere sunny austerity of these rocky sere places, the twitter of birds telling of renewed life, suggesting what, to us, seem the homes of the world's happy youth.
What part of speech is sere?
Sere can be an adjective, a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce sere?
Sere is pronounced /sɪə/ (UK).

Words near sere in the dictionary

  1. serdexmethylphenidate
  2. Serdiuk
  3. SERDs
  4. Serdy
  5. serdyuk
  6. sere
  7. Serean
  8. Sereans
  9. Serebrennikov
  10. Serebrianka
  11. Sereda

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sere (page history and authors); SERE (page history and authors); Sere (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-uk-sere.oga.

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