Mojave Desert
6
3.8
- proper noun
- /moʊˈhɑːvi ˈdɛzərt/
:
Desierto de Mojave
- Beyond the hills were more hills, and then the flat expanse of the Mojave Desert, trackless and vast.
Examples
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Still, it isn't as easy as it looks to figure out what point marks the beginning of the Mojave Desert, even in places with big obvious boundaries.
Blog text (2) -
But Mount Charleston is in Nevada, and Clark Mountain is just inside California, so Californians often refer to Clark Mountain as the "tallest mountain in the Mojave Desert," even if they really ought to know better.
Blog text (2) -
I bet it was really hot coming across the Mojave Desert.
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So I was driving across the Mojave Desert and I felt a very strong urge to pull over.
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Here we are in the middle of the Mojave Desert in a place that doesn't have a name.
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Just before dawn on 28 June last year, the Mojave Desert 200 km east of Los Angeles was struck by a magnitude-7.3 earthquake.
Academic text (1993) -
Mount Wilson and Baldy were prominently in view, and beyond the mountains was the Mojave Desert, where the habitable world stopped.
Fiction book (1993) -
As the New York Times recently reported: "Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation in Congress to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region" (Woody 2009).
Academic text (2011) -
Joshua trees are often offered as an indicator species for the Mojave—if they grow naturally in a spot, that spot's in the Mojave Desert—but Joshua trees grow on the wrong sides of the boundary in quite a few places.
Blog text (2) -
As I drove through the vast expanse of the Mojave Desert, I marveled at its unique cactus and rock formations.
Synonyms
22
6.4
A large desert in southern California and western Arizona with very dry weather and Joshua trees
A large dry area in southern California and western Arizona with hot weather and Joshua trees
Surface Forms
Morphology
This is a straightforward place-name formed from the toponym 'Mojave' plus the noun 'desert'; a learner who knows 'desert' and recognizes 'Mojave' as a place or region will readily infer it refers to a desert region called Mojave. The meaning is literal and compositional (toponym + geographic noun), a cross-linguistically common pattern with no idiomatic shift.
Etymology
Mojave Desert — The name Mojave comes from the Native American people called the Mojave, whose name Spanish speakers wrote as 'Mojave' or 'Mohave'. That's why the desert is named after the people who once lived along the Colorado River.