sere

adj

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.”

   “[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.”

   “Perhaps it is the scant, delicate detail revealing finer lines, which thus turns corners of Tuscany into an imaginary Hellas. 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.”

   “[…] a blighted land / More wasted, serer than before.”

   “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.”

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—”

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.”

4. (British, 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.”

5. (British, 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.].”

noun

1. A natural succession of animal or plant communities in an ecosystem, especially a series of communities succeeding one another from the time a habitat is unoccupied to the point 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).”

   “[C]ommunity types may represent either climax plant associations or successional communities within a sere.”

   “[S]ome communities persisted as repeating early successional seres ("disclimaxes"), while climax communities could contain small areas of different sere communities.”

2. (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.”

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

name

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