desolate

Etymology

From Middle English desolate, from Latin dēsōlātus, past participle of dēsōlāre (“to leave alone, make lonely, lay waste, desolate”), from sōlus (“alone”).

adj

1. Deserted and devoid of inhabitants.
   a desolate isle; a desolate wilderness; a desolate house
   And the silvery marish flowers that throng / The desolate creeks and pools among. 1830, Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Dying Swan
2. Barren and lifeless.
3. Made unfit for habitation or use because of neglect, destruction etc.
   desolate altars
4. Dismal or dreary.
5. Sad, forlorn and hopeless.
   He was left desolate by the early death of his wife.

verb

1. To deprive of inhabitants.
   If you consider well of the People of the West-Indies, it is very probable, that they are a newer or younger People, than the People of the old World. And it is much more likely, that the destruction that hath heretofore been there, was not by Earthquakes, […] but rather, it was Desolated by a particular Deluge: For Earthquakes are seldom in those Parts. 1625, Francis Bacon, “Of Vicissitude of Things”, in Essays, London: H. Herringman et al., published 1691, page 204
   O Righteous Themis, if the Pow’rs above By Pray’rs are bent to pity, and to love; If humane Miseries can move their Mind; If yet they can forgive, and yet be kind; Tell how we may restore, by second birth, Mankind, and people desolated Earth. 1717, John Dryden, transl., Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dublin: G. Risk et al., published 1727, Volume I, Book I, p. 16
   York was so desolated just before the survey that it is not easy to estimate its ordinary population […] 1891, Charles Creighton, chapter 1, in A History of Epidemics in Britain, Cambridge University Press, page 23
2. To devastate or lay waste somewhere.
   But in Utopia there will be wide stretches of cheerless or unhealthy or toilsome or dangerous land with never a household; there will be regions of mining and smelting, black with the smoke of furnaces and gashed and desolated by mines, with a sort of weird inhospitable grandeur of industrial desolation, and the men will come thither and work for a spell and return to civilisation again, washing and changing their attire in the swift gliding train. 1905, H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, Chapter 2, § 3
3. To abandon or forsake something.
   It is not to be supposed that when Cush left Armenia, he left it desolate, and that a rich and long settled country was abandoned altogether; for it would be an absurd way of founding an universal empire, to desolate one country in order to people another. 1828, Algernon Herbert, Nimrod: A Discourse on Certain Passages of History and Fable
   This completion of the Temple and attack upon Christians is the event that marks the apostasy that causes desolation, the detestable act that causes God to desolate (abandon) and destroy the Temple for the last time. 2007, James B. Jordan, The Handwriting on the Wall: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel
   Combining widowed, separated, and divorced elders into a single group ("desolated"), the data indicated that desolated elders were slightly more lonely than either married or never-married older people (although this trend was not statistically significant at the conventional .05 level). 2013, Tracey A. Revenson, “Debunking the Myth of Lonelines in Late Life”, in Redefining Social Problems, page 126
4. To make someone sad, forlorn and hopeless.
   It is not altogether uncommon to hear a reader whose heart has been desolated by the poignancy of a narrative complain that the writer is unemotional. 1914, Arnold Bennett, The Author’s Craft, London: Hodder & Stoughton, Part II, p. 44
   Kumalo stood shocked at the frightening and desolating words. 1948, Alan Paton, chapter 36, in Cry, the Beloved Country, New York: Scribner, page 271