Wasteland

How to spell wasteland

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce wasteland

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wasteland mean?

1. nounAn area of barren, empty, or ruined land that is unused and unproductive.
2. nounA place, period, or situation seen as spiritually, culturally, or intellectually empty and unrewarding.

Wasteland in a sentence

• The abandoned factory site had become a polluted wasteland ringed by rusting fences.

• Critics dismissed late-night television as a cultural wasteland of repeats and adverts.

• After the drought, the once fertile fields turned into a cracked wasteland.

• The long unemployed stretch felt like a wasteland with no clear direction.

Where does wasteland come from?

Language of origin: French

The first element, 'waste', traces back to the Latin adjective vastus, meaning 'empty', 'vast', or 'desolate', which passed into English through the Old North French form 'wast' and the verb 'waster' (to ravage or lay empty) after the Norman Conquest of the 1000s. The second element, 'land', is a thoroughly native word of Germanic stock, present in Old English from the very earliest records to mean ground or country. The two were eventually joined into a single compound describing barren, uncultivated, or ruined ground, with the closed one-word form becoming standard. The same vastus root also gives us 'vast' and 'devastate', which helps explain why the idea behind 'wasteland' is sheer emptiness rather than mere rubbish. T. S. Eliot's 1922 poem 'The Waste Land' kept the older two-word spelling, but modern usage overwhelmingly fuses it into one word.

How the word is built

• waste (desolate, unused)
• land (ground, territory); a closed compound noun