desiccate

1. 1.

   preserve by removing all water and liquids from

   “carry dehydrated food on your camping trip”

   Synonymsdehydrate

   Broaderpreserve
2. 2.

   remove water from

   “All this exercise and sweating has dehydrated me”

   Synonymsdehydrate

   Broaderdry
3. 3.

   lose water or moisture

   “In the desert, you get dehydrated very quickly”

   Synonymsexsiccatedehydratedry up

   Broaderdry

1. 1.

   lacking vitality or spirit; lifeless

   “a technically perfect but arid performance of the sonata”

   “a desiccate romance”

   “a prissy and emotionless creature...settles into a mold of desiccated snobbery”

   Synonymsariddesiccated

   Similardull

Other forms of desiccate

past tense

desiccated·

present participle

desiccating·

third person

desiccates·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about desiccate

What does desiccate mean?

desiccate means "preserve by removing all water and liquids from". That is the primary sense; the word has 4 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in desiccate?

desiccate has 3 syllables: des-ic-cate. The stress falls on "des". In IPA it is /ˈdɛsəkeɪt/.

What is another word for desiccate?

Close synonyms include dehydrate, dehydrate, exsiccate, dehydrate, dry up. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is desiccate a common word?

desiccate is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.