How to Use desiccate in a Sentence
desiccate
verb-
The grass will grow like crazy when the rains come, then quickly desiccate when the landscape dries.
—WIRED, 10 Aug. 2023
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This will protect the flower buds from the strong winds which can desiccate them.
—Dave Epstein, BostonGlobe.com, 30 Jan. 2023
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The idea that they were buried under the sand and desiccated and lacking any sort of moisture.
—Joanna Robinson, VanityFair.com, 3 Apr. 2017
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Edward is in the grip of a grotesque malady that causes his flesh to desiccate and slough away.
—Sam Sacks, WSJ, 17 June 2022
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The veld looked like the giant desiccated hide of some ancient creature, skinned and scarred and skeletal.
—Stanley Stewart, Condé Nast Traveler, 21 Dec. 2018
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Many of us live on patches of ground that look as desiccated as that roof Novak started with.
—Dominique Browning, New York Times, 1 June 2016
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Rainy winters and springs encourage the growth of plants, which desiccate in the dry summer and turn into fuel.
—Wired, 21 July 2022
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The mountains here are steep, desiccated, and flat-out savage.
—Aaron Gulley, Outside Online, 16 Apr. 2018
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Pipe a line of frosting around the hat and sprinkle with nonpareils or desiccated coconut.
—Woman's Day Kitchen, Woman's Day, 30 Nov. 2018
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Wood releases most of its moisture through its end grain, and both types of stacks expose the wood to capitalize on the heat of the sun and desiccating breezes.
—Roy Berendsohn, Popular Mechanics, 28 Sep. 2018
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Slicing through valleys, the winds gather more speed, desiccating the air.
—Wired, 8 Oct. 2019
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The mocking laughter of the servant Lesbus, and the grim image of the dead and desiccated Roman wolf that descends behind him, seem more like their curse.
—James Romm, The New York Review of Books, 1 Mar. 2020
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A few weeks later, a reporter found Rippee at a Vallejo strip mall, asleep on a patch of concrete littered with dirty socks and desiccated orange peels.
—Jocelyn Wiener, SFChronicle.com, 4 Jan. 2020
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Plants were torn from their homes and those that remained had most of their foliage almost instantly desiccated.
—Paul Cappiello, The Courier-Journal, 2 Feb. 2018
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Scientific efforts to rule the rain began in the United States sometime during the late 1800s, when a series of droughts desiccated great swaths of the nation.
—Maya Wei-Haas, Smithsonian, 19 Oct. 2017
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The American landscape is littered with the husks of news outlets desiccated by the migration of life-giving attention from a page that folds to a page that glows.
—Karl Vick, Time, 10 Oct. 2019
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The giraffe—looking desiccated but not disfigured—was put on display in a clear, airless box.
—Ian Parker, The New Yorker, 16 Jan. 2017
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In that sense, the beige tone of Mr. Mueller’s report — that desiccating bureaucratese denying the events their juice and soundbite-ability — is something of a radical act in this day and age.
—James Poniewozik, New York Times, 25 June 2019
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There are bigger problems in the world and in the desiccated, creaking husk that is the Democrats’ political infrastructure.
—Jesse Singal, Daily Intelligencer, 31 Oct. 2017
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In Uzbekistan, the entire eastern basin of the South Aral Sea is completely desiccated, leaving merely a single strip of water in the west.
—Taylor Weidman, National Geographic, 16 Mar. 2018
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Last week my doctor switched me to Armour desiccated thyroid.
—Teresa Graedon, The Seattle Times, 25 Feb. 2018
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An agricultural fair in Zambia’s Mumbwa district is a three-hour drive from Lusaka, much of it through maize fields desiccated by drought.
—The Economist, 22 Aug. 2019
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Those hot days are blamed in part for desiccating the region’s foliage, essentially preparing the area for this month’s wildfires.
—Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, 17 Oct. 2017
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Earth’s atmosphere has a habit of desiccating things, after all, so plants evolved something called cutin, a waxy barrier against the elements.
—Matt Simon, WIRED, 21 June 2018
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Some tribes in Iron Age Britain placed their dead in special places to be desiccated by the elements rather than cremated or interred; if the Iceni followed this practice, then nothing would remain of the queen.
—Richard Hingley, National Geographic, 22 Oct. 2019
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Instead, the Dudok projected a lean smooth sound, neither desiccated nor sharp-edged.
—Alan Artner, chicagotribune.com, 13 Jan. 2018
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The landscape is barren and desiccated, resembling the moon or some distant celestial body, a reminder that the astronauts are a long way from Cape Canaveral.
—Christian Davenport, Houston Chronicle, 15 June 2018
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Scales form over buds to protect them from desiccating or drying out, and from freezing temperatures.
—Bonnie Blodgett, Twin Cities, 14 Jan. 2017
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Tinder-dry vegetation has blown into power lines, sparking fires fanned by high winds across a landscape desiccated from drought and climate change.
—Washington Post, 13 Nov. 2019
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Despite its strange shape, trajectory and lack of a tail, ‘Oumuamua is just a comet after all, its ice locked away beneath a tarlike crust hardened and desiccated by eons of bombardment by cosmic rays.
—Lee Billings, Scientific American, 9 Jan. 2018
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'desiccate.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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