desiccate

He dedicated scarce water to building up agriculture, helping to desiccate the ancient Persian system of underground aqueduct-like canals known as qanats.

From New York Times ● Jun. 21, 2023

There's "a critical point", though, when the tree can't replenish the water lost through pores in the leaves and will "literally desiccate" or dry up.

From BBC ● Aug. 19, 2022

It is a combination of two things: a lack of rain and those thirsty atmospheric conditions that desiccate the landscape.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 25, 2021

In my classrooms, half-finished clay projects littered the countertops, while palettes loaded with acrylic paint and incomplete canvases were left to desiccate and gather dust on the shelves.

From Salon ● May 18, 2020

Now she seemed to desiccate by the moment.

From "The Girl Who Drank the Moon" by Kelly Barnhill

The sequence of a wet season that allows grasses to grow, followed by a dry spell that desiccates them, results in a particularly high fuel load for fires, Brewington said.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 11, 2023

But if you make the walls too thin, your jack-o’-lantern’s fangs will become inward-curving skin tabs as the pulp desiccates and deforms.

From Scientific American ● Oct. 19, 2022

What remains on the landscape is a body of skin and bones that then slowly desiccates and deflates, eventually preserved for the eons.

From New York Times ● Oct. 12, 2022

Like a giant hair dryer, the wind desiccates everything in its path.

From Slate ● Nov. 20, 2018

Let a good, thorough-paced proser get hold of one of these stories, and he carefully desiccates them of whatever fancy may be left, till he has reduced them to the proper dryness of fact.

From Among My Books First Series by James Russell Lowell

Finally, Sen. Mitch McConnell’s desiccated remains returned to cast a vote in the Senate.

From Salon ● Sep. 18, 2026

There was the chirping of cicadas and the crunch of desiccated pine needles underfoot, but the most remarkable thing about the place was the quiet.

From Slate ● Sep. 8, 2026

"Everything is there. I was stuck here," he told AFP in Karachi, near the well-known Bengali market where he peddles desiccated fish and prawns to make ends meet for $7 to $9 per day.

From Barron's ● Feb. 23, 2026

He was “working with the new FDA,” he said in a LinkedIn post in November, to remove from the market desiccated thyroid extracts, a product critical to another company led by Tang, American Laboratories Holdings.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 3, 2025

The buds on a weeping spruce cascade over a small embankment—a little hint of life beneath the desiccated vines and leaves.

From "Love, Hate & Other Filters" by Samira Ahmed

In the Rocky Mountains, years of extreme heat and drought have baked the landscape, drying up streams that feed the Colorado River and desiccating pastures where cattle graze.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 5, 2026

He says they were "like plastic...you could almost knock them...they were black, desiccating, clenched".

From BBC ● May 21, 2024

Thank you, Bill Burr, for sparing me from suffering through more than 90 minutes of Bill Maher’s desiccating “Club Random” podcast.

From Salon ● May 16, 2024

Hotter conditions have also caused more moisture to evaporate from the landscape, desiccating croplands and causing millions of livestock to starve.

From Washington Post ● Apr. 27, 2023

Composed of heat-resistant plastic and chemically treated cork layers, and equipped with a desiccating unit to keep the air bone-dry, the insosuits could withstand the full glare of Mercury’s sun for twenty minutes.

From "I, Robot" by Isaac Asimov