Deserted

How to spell deserted

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce deserted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does deserted mean?

1. adjectiveEmpty of people; abandoned and left without inhabitants or activity.
2. verbAbandoned someone or something, leaving them behind or without support.

Deserted in a sentence

• adjective

  The town centre felt eerily deserted after the last shop closed for the night.

• verb

  The soldier deserted his post and faced a court martial.

• adjective

  They parked on a deserted stretch of road with no other cars in sight.

• verb

  She felt that her colleagues had deserted her when the project failed.

Where does deserted come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb deserere, meaning 'to abandon' or 'to forsake', literally 'to un-join' or 'to disconnect'. It was built from the prefix de-, carrying the sense of undoing or reversing, and serere, meaning 'to join together' or 'to link in a row', the same root that gives us 'series' and 'assert'. English took the word in through Old French deserter during the 1400s, and the past participle 'deserted' came to describe both a person who has been abandoned and a place left empty of people. A neat memory aid lives in the single 's': the word for abandoning shares the dry, lonely 'desert' (the barren land), both with one 's', while the sweet 'dessert' that doubles the 's' is unrelated. Keeping that single 's' in mind separates 'deserted' from the calorie-laden 'dessert' it is so often confused with.

How the word is built

• de- (un-, reverse of)
• sert (from Latin serere: to join, link)
• -ed (past/adjectival suffix)