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Glite Dictionary
Taklimakan Desert

Taklimakan Desert

7.9
A large desert in western China with very dry weather and moving sand dunes
  • proper noun
translation icon : desierto de Taklimakan
  • The Taklimakan Desert, located in western China, is one of the largest deserts in the world.

Examples

  • The Taklimakan Desert is famous for its large sand dunes and extreme dryness.

  • Many travelers find the Taklimakan Desert to be a challenging but beautiful landscape.

  • In 1995, an international television crew secured the rights to make a film about the lost tribe of China's Taklimakan Desert (Lim 1995).

    Academic text (1997)

  • Two hundred members of the Uygur tribe live in a forty-square-mile oasis in the Taklimakan Desert, subsisting on game and wild plants.

    Academic text (1997)

Synonyms

Taklamakan Desert
vsTaklimakan Desert
7.2

A large sandy desert in western China with very dry land and strong winds

is the identical place but uses a different spelling of the name

Surface Forms

Taklimakan Desert main

Morphology

Taklimakan + desert

This is a straightforward proper-name + noun combination: the phrase denotes a desert called 'Taklimakan.' Even if a learner does not know the name 'Taklimakan,' knowing the word 'desert' allows them to infer the referent is a type of desert, and the construction (place-name + category noun) is cross-linguistically transparent.

Etymology

Taklimakan Desert may come from an old local phrase meaning 'enter and you will not return'. Traders on the Silk Road warned that its deep sands and heat could swallow people and camels, so the name still suggests a vast, dangerous desert today.