desert

from The Century Dictionary.

• To abandon, either in a good or a bad sense; forsake; hence, to cast off or prove recreant to: as, to desert a falling house; a deserted village; to desert a friend or a cause.
• To leave without permission; forsake; escape from, as the service in which one is engaged, in violation of duty: as, to desert an army; to desert one's colors; to desert a ship.
• To quit a service or post without permission; run away: as, to desert from the army.
• noun Specifically — In phytogeography, one of the three principal types of Schimper's climatic formations, the result of excessive drought or cold. In desert all surviving vegetation is stunted and the difference between woodland and grass-land (the other two grand types) is obliterated.
• Deserted; uncultivated; waste; barren; uninhabited.
• Pertaining to or belonging to a desert; inhabiting a desert: as, the desert folk.
• noun A desert place or region; a waste; a wilderness; specifically, in geography, a region of considerable extent which is almost if not quite destitute of vegetation, and hence uninhabited, chiefly on account of an insufficient supply of rain: as, the desert of Sahara; the Great American Desert.
• noun = Syn, Wilderness, Desert. Strictly, a wilderness is a wild, unreclaimed region, uninhabited and uncultivated, while a desert is largely uncultivable and uninhabitable owing to lack of moisture. A wilderness may be full of luxuriant vegetation. In a great majority of the places where desert occurs in the authorized version of the Bible, the revised version changes it to wilderness.
• noun See dessert.
• noun A deserving; that which makes one deserving of reward or punishment; merit or demerit; good conferred, or evil inflicted, which merits an equivalent return: as, to reward or punish men according to their deserts.
• noun That which is deserved; reward or penalty merited.
• noun Synonyms Desert, Merit, Worth. Desert expresses most and worth least of the thought or expectation of reward. None of them suggests an actual claim. He is a man of great worth or excellence; intellectual worth; moral worth; the merits of the piece are small; he is not likely to get his deserts.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• transitive verb To leave (especially something which one should stay by and support); to leave in the lurch; to abandon; to forsake; -- implying blame, except sometimes when used of localities.
• transitive verb (Mil.) To abandon (the service) without leave; to forsake in violation of duty; to abscond from
• adjective Of or pertaining to a desert; forsaken; without life or cultivation; unproductive; waste; barren; wild; desolate; solitary.
• adjective (Bot.) the assemblage of plants growing naturally in a desert, or in a dry and apparently unproductive place.
• adjective (Zoöl.) a small hare (Lepus sylvaticus, var. Arizonæ) inhabiting the deserts of the Western United States.
• adjective (Zoöl.) an American mouse (Hesperomys eremicus), living in the Western deserts.
• noun That which is deserved; the reward or the punishment justly due; claim to recompense, usually in a good sense; right to reward; merit.
• noun A deserted or forsaken region; a barren tract incapable of supporting population, as the vast sand plains of Asia and Africa which are destitute of moisture and vegetation.
• noun A tract, which may be capable of sustaining a population, but has been left unoccupied and uncultivated; a wilderness; a solitary place.
• intransitive verb To abandon a service without leave; to quit military service without permission, before the expiration of one's term; to abscond.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• verb To leave (anything that depends on one's presence to survive, exist, or succeed), especially when contrary to a promise or obligation; to abandon; to forsake.
• verb To leave one's duty or post, especially to leave a military or naval unit without permission.
• noun A barren area of land or desolate terrain, especially one with little water or vegetation; a wasteland.
• noun figuratively Any barren place or situation.
• adjective Abandoned, deserted, or uninhabited; usually of a place.
• noun usually in plural That which is deserved or merited; a just punishment or reward

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• verb desert (a cause, a country or an army), often in order to join the opposing cause, country, or army
• noun arid land with little or no vegetation
• verb leave behind
• verb leave someone who needs or counts on you; leave in the lurch