Word of the Day: desolation

The word desolation has appeared in 35 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Dec. 14 in “50 Years After the Apollo 17 Mission, the Moon Looks Closer Than Ever” by Joshua Sokol:

Fifty years ago today, two men woke up on humanity’s last day on the moon.

Nobody would be back to the moon anytime soon. Plans for additional Apollo missions had been scrapped two years earlier, in 1970. A few minutes ahead of their scheduled wake-up time, two NASA astronauts, Eugene A. Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, called home from Apollo 17’s smelly, dust-strewn lunar module to croon “Good morning to you” down to Earth. Mission Control responded with a blast of “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” recently famous from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the Stanley Kubrick film that imagined permanent lunar outposts and human journeys to Jupiter

Their formal goodbyes had already been delivered to the TV cameras. The only thing left to do was to work down a few prelaunch checklists, depart to meet with Ronald E. Evans in the command module and then head home to Earth. “Now, let’s get off,” Cernan said, and so they did, their craft climbing up from the moon’s gray desolation until it was lost in a black sky.

Daily Word Challenge

Can you correctly use the word desolation in a sentence?

Based on the definition and example provided, write a sentence using today’s Word of the Day and share it as a comment on this article. It is most important that your sentence makes sense and demonstrates that you understand the word’s definition, but we also encourage you to be creative and have fun.

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If you want a better idea of how desolation can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com.

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The Word of the Day is provided by Vocabulary.com. Learn more and see usage examples across a range of subjects in the Vocabulary.com Dictionary. See every Word of the Day in this column.