desolate

Adjective

desolate (comparative more desolate, superlative most desolate)

1. Deserted and devoid of inhabitants.
   • a desolate isle; a desolate wilderness; a desolate house
   • I will make Jerusalem […] a den of dragons, and I will make the cities of Judah desolate, without an inhabitant.1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Jeremiah 9:11

   Synonyms:

   peopleless, uninhabited, abandoned, derelict, desert, deserted, discarded, dropped, forlorn, forsaken

   Antonyms:

   inhabited, populated

2. Barren and lifeless.

   Synonyms:

   dearthful, scrunty, sere, sterile

   Antonyms:

   fertile

3. Made unfit for habitation or use because of neglect, destruction etc.
   • desolate altars

   Synonyms:

   devastated, empty, forsaken, ravaged, wasted

4. Dismal or dreary.

   Synonyms:

   bleak, gloomy, cheerless, comfortless, dark, morose, depressing, dire, disconsolate, dismal

   Antonyms:

   cheerful

5. Sad, forlorn and hopeless.
   • He was left desolate by the early death of his wife.
   • voice of the poor and desolate1827, [John Keble], The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year, volume (please specify |volume=I or II), Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] [B]y W. Baxter, for J....

   Synonyms:

   miserable, sorrowful, atrabiliary, atrabilious, blitheless, dispirited, blue, bummed out, chapfallen, cheerless

   Antonyms:

   comforting

Verb

IPA/ˈdɛsəleɪt/

desolate (third-person singular simple present desolates, present participle desolating, simple past and past participle desolated)

1. To deprive of inhabitants.
   • If you consider well of the People of the West-Indies, it is very probable, that they are a newer or younger People, than the People of the old World. And it is much more likely, that the destruction that hath heretofore been there, was not by Earthquakes, […] but rather, it was Desolated by a...1625, Francis Bacon, “Of Vicissitude of Things”, in Essays, London: H. Herringman et al., published 1691, page 204
   • O Righteous Themis, if the Pow’rs above
     By Pray’rs are bent to pity, and to love;
     If humane Miseries can move their Mind;
     If yet they can forgive, and yet be kind;
     Tell how we may restore, by second birth,
     Mankind, and people desolated Earth.1717, John Dryden, transl., Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dublin: G. Risk et al., published 1727, Volume I, Book I, p. 16

   Synonyms:

   depeople, depopulate, dispeople, unpeople, unpopulate

2. To devastate or lay waste somewhere.
   • Then Moath pointed where a cloud
     Of Locusts, from the desolated fields
     Of Syria, wing’d their way.1801, Robert Southey, “The Third Book”, in Thalaba the Destroyer, volume I, London: […] [F]or T[homas] N[orton] Longman and O[wen] Rees, […], by Biggs and Cottle, […], →OCLC, page 168
   • But in Utopia there will be wide stretches of cheerless or unhealthy or toilsome or dangerous land with never a household; there will be regions of mining and smelting, black with the smoke of furnaces and gashed and desolated by mines, with a sort of weird inhospitable grandeur of industrial...1905, H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, Chapter 2, § 3

   Synonyms:

   devastate, ravage, destroy, annihilate, aerosolize, atomize, benothing, bewreck, blot out, blotto

3. To abandon or forsake something.
   • It is not to be supposed that when Cush left Armenia, he left it desolate, and that a rich and long settled country was abandoned altogether; for it would be an absurd way of founding an universal empire, to desolate one country in order to people another.1828, Algernon Herbert, Nimrod: A Discourse on Certain Passages of History and Fable
   • This completion of the Temple and attack upon Christians is the event that marks the apostasy that causes desolation, the detestable act that causes God to desolate (abandon) and destroy the Temple for the last time.2007, James B. Jordan, The Handwriting on the Wall: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel, →ISBN

   Synonyms:

   give up, relinquish, vacate, withsake

4. To make someone sad, forlorn and hopeless.
   • It is not altogether uncommon to hear a reader whose heart has been desolated by the poignancy of a narrative complain that the writer is unemotional.1914, Arnold Bennett, The Author’s Craft, London: Hodder & Stoughton, Part II, p. 44
   • Kumalo stood shocked at the frightening and desolating words.1948, Alan Paton, chapter 36, in Cry, the Beloved Country, New York: Scribner, page 271

   Synonyms:

   deject, get down, aggrieve, attrist, begloom, begrieve, besorrow, grieve, pain, bring down