Desert

A desert is a landscape or region that receives an extremely low amount of precipitation, less than enough to support growth of most plants. Most deserts have an average annual precipitation of less than 400 millimetres (16 in). A common definition distinguishes between true deserts, which receive less than 250 millimetres (10 in) of average annual precipitation, and semideserts or steppes, which receive between 250 millimetres (10 in) and 400 to 500 millimetres (16 to 20 in).

Famous quotes containing the word desert:

“The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)

“The air deals blows: surely too hard, too often?
No: it is bent on bringing summer down.
Dead leaves desert in thousands, outwards, upwards,
Numerous as birds; but the birds fly away....”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)

“Blame but thyself that hast misdone,
And well deserved to have blame;
Change thou thy way so evil begun,
And then my lute shall sound that same:
But if till then my fingers play
By thy desert their wonted way,
Blame not my lute.”
—Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?–1542)