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Where does the phrase just deserts come from?
Why do we say that someone has gotten their just deserts? Does this turn of phrase have anything to do with dessert (“a sweet food eaten at the end of a meal”) or desert (“a dry land with few plants and little rainfall”)? In fact, the phrase employs neither of these words. Instead, it uses a completely unrelated word that happens to be pronounced like the word for sweets and spelled like the one for a dry place: desert, meaning “reward or punishment deserved or earned by one’s qualities or acts.” This little-used noun is, as you might have guessed, related to the English verb deserve. It has nothing to do with arid, dry land, or with cookies and ice cream.
Examples of desert in a Sentence
Andy Coghlan, New Scientist, 14-20 Oct. 2006
The coastal plain is a desert in terms of precipitation—less than six inches fall annually—but what falls as snow stays to be later distributed by the wind.
—John Hildebrand, Harper's, November 2003
The house finch, a songbird native to the Western desert, has proved to be highly adaptable, having rapidly colonized the Eastern states after its release on Long Island in the early 1940's.
—Jane E. Brody, New York Times, 1 Jan. 2002
we were lost in the desert for days without food
Adjective
While my very American mother swabbed the dishes, Dad lingered at the dinner table, recreating in visceral detail the taste of mint in a Bedouin teacup under a desert sky, or the golden plumage of his father's saluki dogs, or the filigreed robes of the young king at the camel races.
—Diana Abu-Jaber, Vogue, May 2007
… the place in the Texas Panhandle where Highway 66 rolled down off the land of farms and ranches into the beginnings of the desert grassland and red-rock country that dominated New Mexico.
—Susan Croce Kelly, Route 66, 1988
Verb
Boulet saw his longtime partner desert him in the midst of the storm, then had his wife and daughter skip town in its aftermath.
—Mike Flaherty, TV Guide, 10-16 Sept. 2007
Left alone for a moment, he feels mournful, bereft—and then panicky, when he thinks he has been deserted again.
—Richard Corliss, Time, 7 Mar. 2005
But now the building seemed deserted at two in the afternoon, and I soon learned that the paper, incredibly, was forced to advertise for applicants to the staff.
—Arthur Miller, Timebends, 1987
The inhabitants had deserted the town.
She had been married for just over a year when her husband deserted her.
He was deserted by his friends and family.
Noun (2)
the robbers got their just deserts
Ritu Upadhyay, Footwear News, 28 Oct. 2025
Never mind its name, extreme temperatures, and vast expanses of desert—there are also stones that move on their own.
—Graham Averill, Outside, 28 Oct. 2025
Joe Yogerst, Forbes.com, 15 Aug. 2025
Cocktail grapefruit grows wherever conventional grapefruit grows, although fruit quality is best, as with grapefruit generally, in desert or semi-desert conditions.
—Joshua Siskin, Oc Register, 27 Mar. 2025
Carly Tagen-Dye, PEOPLE, 24 Oct. 2025
The entire neighborhood was thus deserted, with its infrastructure entirely devastated—no water networks, no electricity, and no communication or internet.
—Literary Hub, 21 Oct. 2025
See All Example Sentences for desert
Cite this Entry
“Desert.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/desert. Accessed 31 Oct. 2025.
Copy CitationKids Definition
desert
2 of 4 adjective
desert
3 of 4 noun
desert
4 of 4 verb
Noun
Middle English desert "barren land," from early French desert (same meaning), derived from Latin deserere "to desert, abandon," from de- "from, away" and serere "to join together"
Noun
Middle English deserte "quality of being worthy of a reward or punishment," from early French desert (same meaning), from deservir "to deserve," from Latin deservire "to devote oneself to"
Verb
from French déserter "to desert, abandon," from Latin desertare (same meaning), derived from earlier deserere "to desert, abandon" — related to desert entry 1
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