pure

adj

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.”

2. Free of foreign material or pollutants.

   “A guinea is pure gold if it has in it no alloy.”

   “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.”

   “"Hetch Hetchy water is the purest, wholly unpolluted, and forever unpollutable."”

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.”

4. Mere; that and that only.

   “That idea is pure madness!”

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   “The [Isaac] Newton that emerges from the [unpublished] manuscripts is far from the popular image of a rational practitioner of cold and pure reason.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.”

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)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...”

adv

1. (Scotland, not-comparable)to a great extent or degree; extremely; exceedingly.

   “You’re pure busy.”

   “I just get pure shy with the interview cats.”

verb

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

1. (countable, uncountable)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.”

   “Took a drop of the pure, to keep my spirits from sinking, […]”

   “All interpretive frames will impose their categories on the object of historical analysis, and I am not proposing that this narrative of the "pures"; be rejected in favor of some phantasmatic framework that claims to derive more purely from the sources themselves. I will show in chapter 3 that, since the "pures" possibly did not even exist […]”

2. (alt-of, alternative, uncountable)Alternative form of puer (“dung (e.g. of dogs)”).

   “[…] Dogs'-dung is called ‘Pure’, from its cleansing and purifying properties.”

   “Mary smelled the rancid odor of the tannery on the right side of the road.[…] "What is that, Mary?" Jake asked. "'Tis a bag for collecting pure. That is going to be your job, Jake. You are to collect pure." "Pure? What is pure?" "Pure is another word for dung," Mary answered.”

   “[…] surely there was something better for him than chasing the pure (footnote: A term, technically speaking, for dog muck, much prized by the tanneries.) […]”