section_path: Etymology
section_name: Etymology
paragraph_text: Etymology
  
  English desert and its Romance cognates (including Italian and Portuguese deserto, French désert and Spanish desierto) all come from the ecclesiastical Latin dēsertum (originally "an abandoned place"), a participle of dēserere, "to abandon". The correlation between aridity and sparse population is complex and dynamic, varying by culture, era, and technologies; thus the use of the word desert can cause confusion. In English before the 20th century, desert was often used in the sense of "unpopulated area", without specific reference to aridity; but today the word is most often used in its climate-science sense (an area of low precipitation). Phrases such as " desert island " and " Great American Desert ", or Shakespeare 's "deserts of Bohemia " (The Winter's Tale) in previous centuries did not necessarily imply sand or aridity; their focus was the sparse population.