desolating

English

Adjective

desolating (comparative more desolating, superlative most desolating)

Causing anguish and despair.
- 1858, Frederick William Faber, The Foot of the Cross: Or, the Sorrows of Mary, page 302:
  So when Mary's whole nature rose to meet this word of Jesus, and threw itself into the consent she gave, and turned her forcibly as it weer from Jesus to John, it was as if the whole anguish of the Crucifixion gained a new life, a fresh activity, a more potent bitterness, a more desolating power.
- 2011, Charlotte Bingham, Nanny:
  Since falling in love with Brake, and since their separation, these evening hours had become even more desolating, particularly since Grace knew he was somewhere in the house, pacing the library or the drawing room and talking about the things which interested not only him but her too, the unending fascination of colour, of trying to reshape nature, of seeing with the heart, while she sat trapped in a room under the roof mending the children's clothes and half-listening yet again to Dora's ill-determined plans to escape somehow from her servitude to find fame in the music halls.
- 2017, Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, page cxl:
  Roger's Death was a more intimate and a more desolating event than the death of Lytton.
Destructive; ruinous.
- 1832 September, Vicomte de Martignac, “The Spanish Revolution”, in Blackwood's Magazine, volume 32, page 342:
  Why, that it was the cause of Pure Democracy which we were thus called on to support; of universal suffrage, Jacobin clubs, and a furious press; of revolutionary confiscation, democratic anarchy, and unbridled injustice; of the most desolating of tyrannies, the most ruinous of despotisms.
- 1856 July, “Sketches of School-Work: The Historical Lesson”, in National Society's Monthly Paper, number 116, page 183:
  In the reign of Henry VI. commenced one of the most desolating of wars — the War of the Roses.
- 1883, Industrial Education in the United States, page 204:
  It prospered from its first opening until another war, more desolating than that of the Revolution, called away its students, diminished its property, and impoverished its patrons.

Derived terms

desolatingly

Verb

desolating

present participle and gerund of desolate