DESERTED • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Deserted

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/dɪzˈərtɪd/ Listen

verb

Desert v. t. (past & past part. deserted; pres. part. deserting)

To leave (especially something which one should stay by and support); to leave in the lurch; to abandon; to forsake; implying blame, except sometimes when used of localities; as, to desert a friend, a principle, a cause, one's country. "The deserted fortress."

(Mil.) To abandon (the service) without leave; to forsake in violation of duty; to abscond from; as, to desert the army; to desert one's colors.

Desert v. i. To abandon a service without leave; to quit military service without permission, before the expiration of one's term; to abscond. "The soldiers... deserted in numbers."

Synonyms: To abandon; forsake; leave; relinquish; renounce; quit; depart from; abdicate. See Abandon.

adjective

deserted adj.

Having no residents; as, deserted villages.

Synonyms: uninhabited.

No longer used by people.

Synonyms: abandoned, derelict.

Remote from civilization; as, the victim was lured to a deserted spot.

Being left by another without support or assistance; left in the lurch; of people; as, deserted wives and children. Note: In this sense, the label implies some level of dependence of the person(s) being deserted on those deserting them.

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Etymology of 'Deserted'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Deserted" Quotes from Famous Books

... shrinking for a score or two of years. The whole house was, in the common language of the newspaper reports, "a perfect tinder-box," and would probably be a heap of ashes in half an hour. And there was this unfortunate deserted sick man lying between life and death, beyond all help unless some unexpected assistance should come ...

— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... men who drove them, came to Yaroto to die. Three quarters of the spaceport was a vast jungle of looming black shapes, most of them awaiting the breaker's hammer. Ransome dismissed the car and threaded his way through the deserted yards with the certainty of a man used to the ugly ...

— Bride of the Dark One • Florence Verbell Brown

... I have made her suffer, all that long pain I have wickedly caused her, all that sickness of body and mind she owed to me? Will she forget what she knows of my poor ambition, my sordid schemes? Will she let me expiate these things? Will she suffer me to prove that, as I once deserted cruelly, trifled wantonly, injured basely, I can now love ...

— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... when in his reply this very theory was violently attacked and satirised as "mere trifling with words." It never could have occurred to me that Virchow had long since become unfaithful to his most important biological principles, and had deserted his own mechanical "theory of cells;" it never had occurred to me that Virchow could be in great measure wanting in that zoological knowledge which is requisite for a practical comprehension of the cell-soul theory. He has never thoroughly studied either the one-celled Protozoa, ...

— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... house. She had been striving to get him to make certain promises, she said, contingent on her giving him something from her own means. Field said he remonstrated with her to the utmost, but she told him no woman with Sioux blood in her veins ever deserted a brother—or lover. And so she had returned with a packet, presumably of money, and there they found the Indian clinched with Kennedy. Kennedy was rescued in the nick of time, and pledged to silence. The Indian rode away ...

— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King

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