2022-02-05 ศัพท์ น่าสับสน - Set – D - desert & dessert
2022-02-05
ศัพท์ น่าสับสน - Set – D - desert & dessert
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Dictionary.com:
ออกเสียง desert = “DEZ-ert”
ออกเสียง dessert = “dih-ZURT”
Dictionary of Problem Words and Expressions:
desert & dessert
As a noun,
desert differs in spelling, pronunciation, and meaning from dessert.
The term for an arid region is pronounced “DEZ-uhrt.”
The term for a pastry, pudding, or other final course of a meal
is pronounced “di-ZUHRT,” as is the verbdesert:
“While roaming in the desert he had to do without dessert.”
“Do not desert your job now.”
The word desert, as in “just deserts,” has nothing to do with
either arid regions or sweet concoctions.
It derives from the same root as deserves
and means “rewards or punishments”:
“Every contestant will receive his just deserts.”
Common Errors in English Usage Dictionary
Desert & dessert
Perhaps these two words are confused
partly because “dessert” is one of the few words in English
with a double “S” pronounced like “Z" ("brassiere” is another).
That impoverished stretch of sand
called a desert can only afford one “S.”
In contrast, that rich gooey extra thing at the end of the meal
called a dessert indulges in two of them.
The word in the phrase “he got his just deserts”
is confusingly pronounced just like “desserts.”
Dictionary.com:
“Desert” vs. “Dessert”: When To Use Each One
Published May 11, 2021
Let’s be honest:
desert vs. dessert is a spelling issue, not a definition issue.
I
t’s easy to tell the difference between the Sahara and a chocolate cake (even a dry chocolate cake).
But when should you use one S
and when should you use two?
That extra S could be the difference
between mounds of sand and mounds of ice cream
—and that’s an important difference!
In this article, we’ll break down
the origin of and different meanings of each word
and give you tips on how to remember the right spelling every time.
And we’ll sort out the exception just deserts,
where deserts is spelled with one S in the middle
but pronounced like dessert
(you might have thought otherwise,
but trust us on this one—we’re a dictionary).
⚡️ Quick summary
Desert, spelled with one S, refers to a dry region.
Dessert, spelled with two S’s, refers to a sweet dish eaten after a meal.
Sometimes, though,
desert is an entirely different word referring to what you deserve,
especially in the phrase just deserts.
What is a desert?
A desert pronounced [ dez-ert ] is “a large, dry, barren region,
usually having sandy or rocky soil and little or no vegetation.”
You’re probably familiar with some of the world’s famous deserts,
such as the Sahara in northern Africa (the largest in the world), the Kalahari in southern Africa,
the Gobi in Mongolia and China,
and the Mojave in California.
Although people often think of deserts as hot
(and most of the best-known deserts are), they can be cold, too.
The essential criterion for a place to be considered a desert
is a lack of precipitation.
Some extremely cold regions can sometimes be very dry.
Much of Antarctica, for example, is a desert.
What else does desert mean?
Desert can also be used in a figurative way to
refer to any place that’s very dry (and hot),
as in Wow, I’m thirsty—it feels like a desert out here.
It can also be used in a more metaphorical way
to refer to a place that is isolated or barren in some way.
For example,
the term food desert is sometimes used to refer
to a place with a lack of access to affordable, healthy food.
Desert can also be used as a verb
meaning “to abandon” or “to leave a place without intending to return,”
as in The settlers are planning to desert the village.
The related adjective deserted
means “abandoned” or “having no inhabitants,”
as in The whole place was deserted.
As a verb, desert can also mean to “leave one’s duty,”
and a person who does this can be called a deserter.
Here’s where things get a bit tricky:
when desert is used as a verb,
it’s pronounced the same as dessert [ dih-zurt ].
The unrelated noun deserts in the phrase
just deserts is also pronounced like desserts. More on that soon.
Where does the word desert come from?
The noun desert (meaning “a dry region”)
comes from a Middle English word meaning “barren” or “dried up,”
from the Old French des(s)ert, meaning “without inhabitants.”
It ultimately comes from the Latin verb dēserere,
which means “to abandon or forsake”
and is also the root of the verb desert.
This makes sense,
because deserts are known for being barren and deserted.
What is dessert?
Dessert pronounced [ dih-zurt ]
is “the sweet, usually last course of a meal.”
We’re talking cake, pie, ice cream, pudding, fudge, fruit
—you know what dessert is.
Dessert is most commonly eaten after dinner,
but it’s sometimes eaten after lunch, too.
A sweet snack in the middle of the day?
You could call that dessert,
but usually when we use the word dessert,
we’re referring to a sweet dish that follows a meal.
After you eat a meal at a restaurant,
your server might ask, “Would anyone like some dessert?”
(The answer is yes.)
Where does the word dessert come from?
Dessert comes from the French desservir, meaning “to clear the table” (essentially to dis- and serve).
That’s an interesting way to think of it
—dessert is what you eat after the table has been cleared following a meal.
Is it just deserts or just desserts?
Things get a bit more complicated
with the phrase just deserts, which means “what’s rightfully deserved,” especially as a consequence for having done something wrong.
For example, you might say
He won’t get away with this forever—he’ll get his just deserts.
In just deserts,
deserts is pronounced the same as desserts,
but is spelled with only one S in the middle.
That’s because it’s related to the word deserve.
Both it and deserve come from the Old French verb deservir,
meaning “to deserve.”
How to use desert vs. dessert
If you’re struggling to remember how to spell each word,
think of the two S’s in dessert as standing for sugary sweets,
with the one S in desert standing for sand.
When you’re using the phrase just deserts,
remember that it’s spelled with one S in the middle, just like deserve.
Examples of desert and dessert used in a sentence
Here are some examples of how you might hear
the words desert and dessert used in real life.
- The desert is not completely barren—many specialized animals make their home there.
- I didn’t mean to desert you when you needed me most.
- For dessert, I made an ice cream cake.
- This restaurant has the fanciest desserts—let’s order several.
- He got his just deserts when his prank backfired on him.
THE AMERICAN HERITAGE® SCIENCE DICTIONARY:
desert
A CLOSER LOOK
A desert is defined not by temperature
but by the sparse amount of water found in a region.
An area with an annual rainfall of fewer than 25 centimeters (9.75 inches) generally qualifies as a desert.
In spite of the dryness, however, some animals and plants
have adapted to desert life and thrive in these harsh environments.
While different animals live in different types of deserts,
the dominant animals of warm deserts are reptiles,
including snakes and lizards, small mammals,
such as ground squirrels and mice, and arthropods,
such as scorpions and beetles.
These animals are usually nocturnal,
spending the day resting in the shade of plants or burrowed in the ground, and emerging in the evenings to hunt or eat.
Warm-desert plants are mainly ground-hugging shrubs,
small wooded trees, and cacti.
Plant and animal life is scarcer in the cool desert,
where the precipitation falls mainly as snow.
Plants are generally scattered mosses and grasses
that are able to survive the cold by remaining low to the ground,
avoiding the wind,
and animal life can include both large and small mammals,
such as deer and jackrabbits,
as well as a variety of raptors and other birds.
The American Heritage® Student Science Dictionary:
desert
Did You Know?
Spell it with two s's (dessert) and it's ice cream.
Spell it with one s (desert) and it's a place
where you'd have trouble finding a glass of water,
let alone a scoop of vanilla.
A desert is defined by the water you won't find there.
There's no official standard,
but many people say that
any place that gets less than 10 inches of precipitation a year qualifies.
Deserts do not have to be hot.
Even the Sahara Desert in Africa, famous for heat, can get cold at night.
And although many people
think of the Sahara as the world's biggest desert,
that distinction actually belongs to Antarctica,
which is incredibly cold and amazingly dry,
receiving the frozen equivalent of less than 2 inches of water per year.
In spite of this dryness, some animals and plants thrive in deserts.
Each desert is therefore a unique ecosystem,
a particular environment
that includes organisms interacting with it and with each other.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language:
desert
Word History:
When Shakespeare says in Sonnet 72,
"Unless you would devise some virtuous lie,
/ To do more for me than mine own desert,"
he is using the word desert in the sense of "worthiness; merit,"
a word perhaps most familiar to us in the plural,
meaning "something that is deserved,"
as in the phrase just deserts.
This word goes back to the Latin word dēservīre,
"to devote oneself to the service of,"
which in Vulgar Latin came to mean "to merit by service."
Dēservīre is made up of dē-, meaning "thoroughly," and servīre, "to serve."
Knowing this, we can distinguish this
desert from desert, "a wasteland,"
and desert, "to abandon,"
both of which go back to Latin dēserere, "to forsake, leave uninhabited,"
which is made up of dē-, expressing the notion of undoing,
and the verb serere, "to link together."
We can also distinguish all three deserts from dessert,
"a sweet course at the end of a meal,"
which is from the French word desservir, "to clear the table."
Desservir is made up of des-, expressing the notion of reversal,
and servir (from Latin servīre), "to serve," hence, "to unserve"
or "to clear the table."
Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
Choose the Right Synonym for desert
Verb
Abandon, Desert, Forsake
mean to leave without intending to return.
Abandon suggests that the thing or person left may be helpless without protection.
abandoned children
Desert implies that the object left may be weakened but not destroyed by one's absence.
a deserted town
Forsake suggests an action more likely to bring impoverishment or bereavement to that which is forsaken than its exposure to physical dangers.
a forsaken lover
Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
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 witharid, dry land, or with cookies and ice cream.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
Usage Notes
'Just Deserts' or 'Just Desserts'?
The usage advice you deserve
What to Know
Despite its pronunciation,
just deserts, with one s, is the proper spelling for the phrase
meaning "the punishmentthat one deserves."
The phrase is even older than dessert,
using an older noun version of desert
meaning "deserved reward or punishment,"
which is spelled like the arid land, but pronounced like the sweet treat.
Based on the way the second word in just deserts
(“the punishment that one deserves”) is pronounced
one would be forgiven for imagining that
it came about in reference to some form of discipline
involving custards, cookies, or petits fours.
It might even make one wonder why
there are not other meal-based forms of chastisement in our language;
why no deserved breakfasts,
no requisite lunches,
no warranted teas?
Because it’s not that kind of dessert.
The English language is fond of occasionally embracing
its whimsical and illogical side,
in order to keep things interesting for the people who attempt to use it.
For instance, the most common noun form of desert
(“arid land with usually sparse vegetation”)
is pronounced the same way as the adjectival form of this word
(“desolate and sparsely occupied or unoccupied”),
but not the same way as the verb
(“to withdraw from or leave usually without intent to return”),
even though all three words come from the same source
(the Latin deserere, “to desert”).
The verb desert is pronounced the same way
as the dessert you eat after dinner
(which comes from the Latin servir, “to serve”).
And, to make things even more interesting (by which we mean confusing), there is another noun form of desert,
spelled the same as the “arid land” word,
but pronounced like the thing one eats after dinner,
and with a meaning that is similar to neither.
History of 'Just Deserts'
Just deserts uses this, relatively uncommon, noun form of desert,
which may mean “deserved reward or punishment”
(usually used in plural),
“the quality or fact of meriting reward or punishment,”
or “excellence, worth.”
This desert and dessert are etymologically related,
although the former is quite a bit older;
the punishment sense had already been in use for several hundred yearsby the time we got around to adopting the after-dinner word dessert
around 1600.
In fact, the use of just deserts predates that of dessert,
as it came into use in the middle of the 16th century.
In early use desert was often used in the singular,
and just desert might not refer to a punishment,
but to anything that was deserved.
In modern use it is typically found in the plural,
and just deserts almost always is in reference
to a deserved punishment, rather than a reward.
And remember that just deserts has nothing to do
with post-prandial sweets,
unless it is that the punishment that you deserve
is to receive none of these things.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
Word History
What's the 'Desert' in 'Desert Island'?
It's not a desert—it's deserted
Desert island can be a confusing phrase.
Most people probably assume that
it can only be a hot, sandy place with a palm tree or two,
an impression supported by countless New Yorker cartoons
and TV commercials, conforming with the definition of desertplay
as “arid land with usually sparse vegetation and hot temperatures.”
We assume that the desert in desert island is the noun desert.
In fact, the definition is simply "an island where no people live,"
so the desert in desert island is actually an archaic form of deserted:
it refers to an island that is uninhabited,
not one that is covered with sand (with the obligatory palm tree).
Desert and deserted share etymological roots from the Latin word desertus, which means “abandoned” or “deserted.”
These English words date back to the 1200s,
whereas the verb to desert, meaning “to abandon,”
didn’t enter English until some 400 years later
(with a detour through French).
Therefore, although we might think of the essential qualities
of a desert are sand and heat,
the word truly refers to the lack of anything else,
particularly people or cultivated land.
Going back further into the word’s history,
we see that desertus comes
from de (“not”) + serere (“to join” or “to link together”)
—it means “not joined” or “disconnected” from population and civilization and corresponds to the dictionary definition labeled archaic:
“a wild uninhabited and uncultivated tract.”
It’s obvious that the idea of the noun desert
has blended with the adjective desert
meaning “deserted” in the minds of most English speakers.
It’s clear in some early modern contexts
that desert is used adjectivally to mean “uninhabited”:
It’s also clear that desert island soon became a metaphor for
“isolated place”;
a play called The Desert Island was performed in London in the 1760s.
This is a passage from its preface:
Indeed, the original Italian title of The Desert Island is L’Isola Dishabitata, which literally translates as “uninhabited island.”
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe has a chapter
called “Wrecked on a Desert Island," a location that is clearly not a desert.
Since there were native inhabitants in Defoe's novel,
this use of the term, as well as the first quotation
given in the Oxford English Dictionary,
which refers to "many desart Islandes inhabited of wilde men,"
shows that "uninhabited" was used to
mean "uninhabited by Europeans" for a long time.
There are other similar archaic forms of adjectives
that are still used in specific instances in English:
think of roast beef (instead of “roasted beef”).
The idea of a desert island as the perfect place to bring a record player
and be alone with your favorite music (electricity worries notwithstanding) began in 1942, when the BBC began its show “Desert Island Discs”
(the show is still running today).
But even earlier, the idea that isolation provides a reason
to choose one’s favorites was expressed in a quotation
from 1930 in the OED:
“I think I should choose it as my desert-island opera.”
The desert meaning “something deserved,”
as in “They got their just deserts,”
is an unrelated word that comes from the same French root as deserve.
And dessert meaning “sweet food eaten after a meal”
comes from the French verb desservir,
which means “to unserve” or “to clear the table”
—it’s what comes after the main plates are taken away.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
desert vs. dessert
Desert functions as a noun referring to an area of very dry land
that is usually covered with sand and is very hot.
Desert is also a verb that means "to leave a place,"
as in "residents deserted the town,"
or "to leave someone or withdraw support for someone,"
as in "a promise to never desert them."
Desert is also the word in the phrase just deserts.
Dessert is sweet food that is eaten after a meal: "ice cream for dessert."
Collins COBUILD English Usage:
Desert - dessert
1. 'desert' as a noun
A desert /'dezət/ is a large area of land where there is very little water
or rain, no trees, and very few plants.
They crossed the Sahara Desert.
2. 'desert' as a verb
When people or animals desert /dɪ'zɜːt/ a place, they all leave it.
Poor farmers are deserting their fields and coming here looking for jobs.
If you desert someone,
you leave them and no longer help or support them.
All our friends have deserted us.
3. 'dessert'
Dessert /dɪ'zɜːt/ is sweet food served at the end of a meal.
For dessert there was ice cream.
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