desiccate

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

They desiccate when temperatures plummet, sidestepping the potential hazard of ice forming in their tissues.

From Washington Post ● Jul. 5, 2019

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 Lowell, James Russell

We drove past more empty lots, more abandoned groves, desiccated trees, signs announcing public hearings for land-use changes.

From Slate ● Apr. 20, 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

Prof Rein's research finds that, after ten consecutive days of very dry weather, vegetation becomes so desiccated across wide areas that the likelihood of multiple fires igniting simultaneously rises sharply.

From BBC ● Aug. 13, 2025

She looked like she’d been stuck in a cool, dark mausoleum for decades, slowly withering into a desiccated husk.

From "The House of Hades" by Rick Riordan

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

But in the dry volcanic valley, punished by sun and desiccating wind, the newcomers built virtually no homes.

From Seattle Times ● Oct. 3, 2022

The fall and winter seasons are also the time when strong, desiccating offshore winds develop in California.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 13, 2021

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