Desert

How to spell desert

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce desert

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does desert mean?

1. nounA large barren area of land, typically sandy and with very little rainfall or vegetation.
2. verbTo abandon a person, place, or duty, especially one's post in the armed forces.

Desert in a sentence

• noun

  The caravan crossed the desert at night to avoid the heat.

• verb

  A soldier who chooses to desert his unit faces a court martial.

• noun

  Rainfall in the desert is so low that few plants survive there.

• verb

  Loyal customers rarely desert a brand they have trusted for years.

Where does desert come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb deserere, meaning 'to abandon' or 'forsake', formed from the prefix de- (here intensive, originally 'apart') and serere 'to join or bind together', so the literal idea was 'to unbind' or 'sever oneself from'. The past participle desertus gave Late Latin desertum, 'an abandoned place', which passed through Old French as desert into English in the 1200s. From the sense of a forsaken, empty region came the familiar meaning of a barren, sandy wilderness. The verb 'to desert' (to abandon a post or person) preserves the original Latin force most directly. The phrase 'just deserts', meaning what one deserves, comes from the same family through Old French deservir 'to deserve', which is why it is spelled with one 's' and not like the sweet course 'dessert', a separate French word for clearing the table.

How the word is built

• de- (intensive, from dis- 'apart')
• sert (from serere 'to join, link'); the verb sense literally 'to unjoin' or 'sever from'