Desperate

How to spell desperate

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce desperate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does desperate mean?

1. adjectiveFeeling or showing hopelessness, anxiety, or a reckless willingness to do anything to change a dire situation.

Desperate in a sentence

• After months without work, he grew desperate for any kind of income.

• The stranded climbers made a desperate attempt to signal the rescue helicopter.

Where does desperate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin desperatus, the past participle of desperare, a verb meaning 'to lose hope' or 'to give up hope entirely'. That verb was built from de-, here carrying the sense of 'without' or 'down from', joined to sperare, meaning 'to hope', which itself came from the noun spes, 'hope'. English took the word in during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, first describing someone who had abandoned all hope, and only later the modern flavour of reckless, last-ditch urgency. Its close cousin 'despair' travelled the same road from the very same root, so the two share an ancestor as well as a feeling. The spelling trap lives in that middle syllable: writers hear an unstressed schwa and reach for 'a', but the sper element preserves the original Latin sperare, so it is always 'desperate', never 'desparate'.

How the word is built

• de- (without)
• sper (hope, from Latin sperare)
• -ate (adjective suffix)