To abandon, either in a good or a bad sense; forsake; hence, to cast off or prove recreant to: as, to desert a falling house; a deserted village; to desert a friend or a cause.
To leave without permission; forsake; escape from, as the service in which one is engaged, in violation of duty: as, to desert an army; to desert one's colors; to desert a ship.
To quit a service or post without permission; run away: as, to desert from the army.
noun.
See dessert.
noun.
Specifically — In phytogeography, one of the three principal types of Schimper's climatic formations, the result of excessive drought or cold. In desert all surviving vegetation is stunted and the difference between woodland and grass-land (the other two grand types) is obliterated.
noun.
A deserving; that which makes one deserving of reward or punishment; merit or demerit; good conferred, or evil inflicted, which merits an equivalent return: as, to reward or punish men according to their deserts.
noun.
That which is deserved; reward or penalty merited.
noun.
Synonyms Desert, Merit, Worth. Desert expresses most and worth least of the thought or expectation of reward. None of them suggests an actual claim. He is a man of great worth or excellence; intellectual worth; moral worth; the merits of the piece are small; he is not likely to get his deserts.
Deserted; uncultivated; waste; barren; uninhabited.
Pertaining to or belonging to a desert; inhabiting a desert: as, the desert folk.
noun.
A desert place or region; a waste; a wilderness; specifically, in geography, a region of considerable extent which is almost if not quite destitute of vegetation, and hence uninhabited, chiefly on account of an insufficient supply of rain: as, the desert of Sahara; the Great American Desert.
noun.
= Syn, Wilderness, Desert. Strictly, a wilderness is a wild, unreclaimed region, uninhabited and uncultivated, while a desert is largely uncultivable and uninhabitable owing to lack of moisture. A wilderness may be full of luxuriant vegetation. In a great majority of the places where desert occurs in the authorized version of the Bible, the revised version changes it to wilderness.