desiccate

As Western drought and aridification desiccate soils, shrink mountain snowpack runoff and reduce river flows, irrigating alfalfa for dairy production will become more and more problematic.

From Salon ● Oct. 29, 2022

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

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

From Washington Post ● Jul. 5, 2019

A computer guided jets of fertilizer-infused water to desiccate seedlings according to a kill-or-skip pattern that left nine-inch gaps between heads.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 21, 2017

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

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

From Slate ● Apr. 20, 2026

It also got a reprieve in November, when Trump modified his executive order to exempt more than 100 food items from the tariffs—including the desiccated coconut Kesselhaut imports from the Philippines.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 31, 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

Oregon’s Lake Abert has repeatedly dried up, and biologists have found that when it’s desiccated, more phalaropes fly farther south to Mono Lake.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 22, 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

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

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

From Seattle Times ● Oct. 3, 2022

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