desolate

Along a desolate stretch of California desert highway, next to a ramshackle home, law enforcement officials on Wednesday dug for a second day in a search for bodies.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 30, 2026

"A fire is devastating. People who want to come will come anyway. But it’s not the same seeing the green hills as seeing them completely desolate and black."

From Barron's ● Jul. 26, 2026

As we climbed the winding road to Bédar, we emerged into a charred and desolate landscape.

From BBC ● 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 ● May 22, 2026

In the fury of his torment he tried futilely to rouse the omens that had guided his youth along dangerous paths into the desolate wasteland of glory.

From "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The sudden death of Leontes' young son desolates him.

From Time Magazine Archive

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

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

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

It desolates me to think that I cannot offer these apologies to Mr. Vantine in person.

From The Mystery of the Boule Cabinet A Detective Story by Burton Egbert Stevenson

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 ● 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 ● 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 ● Oct. 16, 2021

Already desolated by the empty nest, Alice is also distraught about their dog, Maebelle, a tiny dachshund-Chihuahua mutt who escaped in Riverside Park.

From New York Times ● Aug. 18, 2020

Still—I was desolated when he climbed away and headed back west.

From "Code Name Verity" by Elizabeth Wein

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 ● 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 ● Jan. 18, 2018

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 ● Jul. 20, 2015

It goes beyond documentary, drawing on a visionary stage vocabulary and creating individual stories that are both desolating and stirring.

From The Guardian ● Jan. 27, 2013

From a distant radio I heard the desolating music of a dance orchestra.

From "Black Like Me" by John Howard Griffin