Other forms: deserted, deserts, deserting
A desert is a huge dry area where almost no rain falls. The Sahara desert, cross the desert, desert sand.
The definition is rainfall rather than heat: under about 250 millimetres a year makes a desert, which is why Antarctica is the largest one on earth. Not all deserts are sand — most are rock and gravel. The verb desert, stressed differently, means to abandon, and deserts in the phrase just deserts is a third word entirely, meaning what is deserved.
1noundesertA huge dry area where almost no rain falls.
“A desert gets under about 250 millimetres of rain a year.”
2verbabandonTo abandon somebody or something.
“Her friends deserted her just when she needed them most.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
desert is a dry region, or an abandoning.
Latin desertum means abandoned, from deserere, to forsake. A desert was a deserted place before it was a dry one, and the word displaced the Old English westen.
Proto-Indo-European
*ser- (bind)
Latin
dēsertum
Old French
desert
Middle English
desert — wilderness
English, today
desert
Built from
From Middle English desert (“wilderness”), from Old French desert, from Latin dēsertum, past participle of desero (“to abandon”). Generally displaced native wēsten. egy.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA