The barren, comfortless grief of total loss and loneliness.
The barren, comfortless grief of total loss and loneliness — and, by extension, devastation or a wasteland.
Its defining note is being left alone, forsaken, comfortless — the etymological and emotional core. It uniquely couples emotional emptiness with the image of a laid-waste place, so the sorrow it names feels stripped and isolating rather than merely sad. Emphasizes the aftermath emptiness more than the active pang of grief or mourning; centers on abandonment and barrenness where despair centers on lost hope (the two often co-occur). Far heavier than loneliness. Elevated, literary, grave.
Comfortless, barren grief — the sorrow of being utterly alone, bereft, and emptied out.
From Latin desolare “to leave all alone, forsake”; the emotional sense (late 14c.) predates the physical one.
Ruin, devastation, or a barren, lifeless region.
The concrete “desolated place” sense dates to the 1610s.
Late 14c. “sorrow, grief, affliction,” from Church Latin desolationem, from desolare “leave alone, desert,” from de- “completely” + solare “make lonely,” from solus “alone.” The literal heart of the word is “to leave completely alone.”
A layered development: the emotional sense “sorrow, grief” appears first (late 14c.); the “laying waste / destruction” sense by c. 1400; the concrete “devastated, lifeless region” only by the 1610s. The inner-feeling sense actually predates the physical-wasteland sense. No reliable recent-generation shift.