desolate
Example Sentences
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“Tapeheads” captures a specific moment in Los Angeles history, sure to be nostalgic for some, from a desolate downtown to a percolating music scene.
From Los Angeles Times β Aug. 6, 2026
As we climbed the winding road to Bédar, we emerged into a charred and desolate landscape.
From BBC β Jul. 13, 2026
From her earliest years, Emily thrilled to the austere glories of the landscape, with its great desolate stretches of rocky turf and rushing waterways all shaped and pummeled by winds that whistled and “wuthered.”
From The Wall Street Journal β May 22, 2026
The delicate pitter-patter of a drum’s cymbal is the only sound to break through the thick brick wall of the obscure performance venue, Sun Space, and reach the wide, desolate Sunland Boulevard.
From Los Angeles Times β May 18, 2026
“I wonder how it got out there in the desolate part of California like that. Somebody must have put it there. No way to tell what for.”
From "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick
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The sudden death of Leontes' young son desolates him.
From Time Magazine Archive
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He visits Barbara's soup kitchen shelter and proves with an open checkbook that he can bribe the poor and buy the Army, which desolates Barbara.
From Time Magazine Archive
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But your misrepresentation which pained me most, in fact desolates me to the extent that I am unfit for work, is your statement that I weigh 200 Ib.
From Time Magazine Archive
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He desolates the whole Mohammedan kingdom—and still he is not sated.
From Folk-Tales of Napoleon The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder by George Kennan
Oh very fair! smiling, cultivated, and green, like England, but far happier; for slavery which disgraces the New World, and poverty which desolates the Old, are nowhere to be seen.
From The Englishwoman in America by Isabella L. (Isabella Lucy) Bird
Hospital director Dr Muhammad Abu Salima has called on the WHO and the UN to help the medical teams and patients "leave this desolated place".
From BBC β Nov. 19, 2023
At the same time, Wallerstein could offer a mild reassurance: "It would certainly not be great, but it is not necessarily the desolated moonscape that people sometimes imagine it would be."
From Salon β Oct. 7, 2022
Even in the depths of the pandemic — even when the world locked down, leaving billions isolated and desolated — there were those who danced.
From Seattle Times β Oct. 16, 2021
Everywhere in this desolated settlement, the forest, whose decline the episode had just detailed, is reclaiming its space.
From New York Times β Apr. 10, 2019
But there were not many black people visible on this day and Paradise had the look of a town desolated by plague or the rumor of plague.
From "The Great Santini" by Pat Conroy
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When D’Amore isn’t speaking — and for most of those three minutes and 40 seconds, she is silent — her body language is desolating.
From Salon β Sep. 1, 2019
“The simple way...to put an end to the savage and desolating war now waged by the slaveholders, is to strike down slavery itself, the primal cause of that war.”
From Textbooks β Jan. 18, 2018
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It sounds as if your mother is relatively young herself, so this is a diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s which is even more desolating.
From Slate β Jul. 20, 2015
As the actors take up their places, a desolating video begins to play.
From The Guardian β May 11, 2013
From a distant radio I heard the desolating music of a dance orchestra.
From "Black Like Me" by John Howard Griffin
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Vocabulary lists containing desolate
Figurative Language in King's "I Have a Dream" Speech (1963)
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Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" Speech (1963)
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Zilch, Zip, Nada: Words For Nothing
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