She doesn't care for rich desserts.
Coffee and tea will be served with dessert.
We had ice cream and apple pie for dessert.
These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'dessert.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
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.
First Known Use: 1600
in the meaning defined at sense 1
See Words from the same year: sweet food eaten after the main part of a meal
See words that rhyme with dessert Spanish Central: Translation of dessert Nglish: Translation of dessert for Spanish speakers Britannica English: Translation of dessert for Arabic speakers Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about dessert
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