This entry combines a gloss on the headword in one of its senses ('barren') with two quotations that illustrate the headword in a different sense ('solid'). For other forms of the same word see sigma 1049 and sigma 1051.
[1] = Photius, Lexicon sigma534 Theodoridis, and (with the omission of the etymological commentary), Synagoge sigma215. The etymology, along with a different form of the same gloss, is also found in Timaeus, Platonic Lexicon 1002b, where the lemma is ste/rifai, the nominative plural feminine form of the headword (probably generated by Plato, Theaetetus 149B, where the word appears in the dative plural feminine). While the etymology offered here would seem to restrict application of the term to human and animal females, this form of the headword (and the glosses) is nominative singular masculine, and may be a generic lexical reference. (This form of the headword is unattested in the given sense outside lexicography, and attested only in the sense 'solid' at Dionysius of Byzantium, Voyage through the Bosporus 23.)
[2] Quotation (transmitted, in Adler's view, via the Excerpta of Constantine Porphyrogenitus) unidentifiable. It does resemble Thucydides 6.101.3, describing military maneuvers in the vicinity of Syracuse, but not closely enough to be a paraphrase -- perhaps a conscious or unconscious imitation. The Suda's sterifo/tatos, the nominative singular masculine of the superlative form of the headword adjective, may be a mistake for sterifo/taton (nominative singular neuter), which appears in the corresponding part of Thucydides' sentence and renders a more sensible translation, "...where it was most solid..."
[3] Thucydides 7.36.2 (also via the Excerpta according to Adler), with a comment from the scholia. Here we find the accusative plural feminine comparative form of the headword.