Trego's Mountain Ear

We know the difference- one is a location with lots of sand and the other appears on your plate with lots of sugar. But why do we suffer with such disparate things which look and sound so similar when we read them?

Desert is French in origin. It comes from the French word for serve and the prefix des meaning undo/remove. So, the literal meaning is something along the lines of clearing the table of plates. Which makes good sense for what is typically a final course meal.

Dessert in the sense of the sandy unpleasant region is from Latin. The originating bit of Latin is desertum, which is the noun form of a verb meaning ‘forsake’. The sandy version was added in, and eventually became the main use of the word. The verb form has a similar origin, but goes from Latin to French before it reaches us.

The two words share a prefix, but despite how similar the rest of the word seems, the root of the words is actually different.