Word.ws English Dictionary

desert island

/ˈdɛz.ɚt.aɪlənd/

desert island noun: a deserted island, an uninhabited island, especially one in the tropics and (now frequently misunderstood as) a small and almost entirely sandy desert.

desert island: a deserted island, an uninhabited island, especially one in the tropics and (now frequently...
Image: some guy, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

desert island (plural desert islands)

  1. A deserted island, an uninhabited island, especially one in the tropics and (now frequently misunderstood as) a small and almost entirely sandy desert.
    • What would I take with me to a desert island?
    • My first crew ran away; two men were lost for a month on a desert island; we were ten times aground on coral reefs; we lost four anchors; the sails were devoured by rats; the small boat was lost astern; we were thirty-eight days on the voyage home, which should not have taken twelve [...] we had...1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume II, London: Macmillan and Co., page 384
  2. An island that is completely or mostly a desert, an arid island.
    • Why are you marooning me on a desert island? It's probably full of guano. Can't I go somewhere nice?
  3. (attributive, figuratively) Describing a thing considered so personally indispensable or beloved that one could never tire of it, used especially for books and music.
    • No, no, no. It's a thought experiment. Your desert island books are the one or five or ten books that you could always learn from and never get sick of.
    • My desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order:[…]1995, Nick Hornby, High Fidelity, London: Victor Gollancz, →ISBN, page 9

Examples of desert island in a sentence

  • Desert islands cannot harbour treachery, even from the enemy hidden within man himself.1938, Norman Lindsay, Age of Consent, 1st Australian edition, Sydney, N.S.W.: Ure Smith, published 1962, →OCLC, page 38:
  • It would be my desert island book, this Love Life for Every Married Couple; marriage being to me the most obvious path to the hardest lesson we've all got to learn […]2017, Alan Rifkin, Burdens by Water: An Unintended Memoir:
  • A roast dinner would be my desert island meal and I'd missed Dad's divine crispy King Edwards each Sunday.2021, E. K. J. Wright, How Do You Stop a Magpie Mobbing Your Mind?:

Synonyms of desert island

Forms of desert island

pluraldesert islands

Origin of desert island

From the former sense of desert to mean deserted (“uninhabited”), particularly common on Spanish and Portuguese maps during the Age of Exploration as isla desierta, ilha deserta, and Medieval Latin isla deserta (“uninhabited island”). Now frequently misunderstood as simply desert (“dry, arid location”) and imagined as almost entirely sandy. As an indispensable thing, from the idea of loving something to the point one would want it on a deserted island where it would be used ad infinitum but never ad nauseam. Popularized by the radio show Desert Island Discs (first broadcast 1942) which asked guests what they would take with them if marooned alone on an island.

Questions about desert island

What does desert island mean?
Desert island means a deserted island, an uninhabited island, especially one in the tropics and (now frequently misunderstood as) a small and almost entirely sandy desert.
How do you use desert island in a sentence?
Desert islands cannot harbour treachery, even from the enemy hidden within man himself.
What part of speech is desert island?
Desert island is a noun.
How do you pronounce desert island?
Desert island is pronounced /ˈdɛz.ɚt.aɪlənd/ (US).
What is the plural of desert island?
The plural of desert island is desert islands.

Words near desert island in the dictionary

  1. desert hares
  2. desert holly
  3. Desert Hot Springs
  4. desert ironwood
  5. desert ironwoods
  6. desert island
  7. desert islands
  8. desert kit fox
  9. desert kit foxes
  10. desert kite
  11. desert kites

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: desert island (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-desert island.wav.

Cite this entry: “desert island.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/desert_island. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.