desideratum
noun
Robert Bierstedt
Did you know?
We'd like to introduce you to some close cousins of the common word desire. All trace their roots to the Latin sīder-, or sīdus, which has historically been understood to mean "heavenly body," but which may also have an older, non-celestial meaning of "mark, target, goal." Whether etymologically starry or grounded, dēsīderāre, meaning "to long for," was born when Latin de- was prefixed to sīder-. Dēsīderāre begat Anglo-French desirer, which in turn brought forth English desire, desirous, and desirable in the 13th and 14th centuries, with desideration following in the 15th. Then, in the 17th century, English acquired desiderate ("to wish for") and desideratum (desiderata in the plural), all of which can lay claim to direct ancestry from desiderare.
Examples of desideratum in a Sentence
Aaron David Miller, Foreign Affairs, 30 June 2020
Some of the author costs are used to pay reviewers, causing one to question whether the process is always unbiased, as is the desideratum.
—Neuroskeptic, Discover Magazine, 4 Apr. 2015
Diversity isn’t necessarily an ethical desideratum in a collection.
—New York Times, 28 Sep. 2021
But there’s another overall desideratum: The system has to be straightforward enough to be managed easily — to get large numbers of people vaccinated as swiftly as possible.
—Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York Times, 23 Feb. 2021
Remaining at home is invariably the desideratum for most among the elderly, and this includes the wish to die at home.
—Joseph Epstein, WSJ, 17 Jan. 2020
We marketing teams came to believe we alone could save startups from untimely deaths by achieving the desideratum to end all desiderata: product/market fit.
—Wired, 22 Oct. 2019
Airports supply the greatest desideratum of physical retail: foot traffic.
—Daniel Gross, Slate Magazine, 7 Sep. 2017
Cite this Entry
“Desideratum.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/desideratum. Accessed 5 May. 2025.
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