dessert
- 01 A2 Elementary
a sweet dish that you eat at the end of a meal.
the final course of a meal, usually consisting of sweet confections, fruit, or cheese.
Simple“For dessert, we had warm apple pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.”
In context“The restaurant is famous for its elaborate dessert menu, featuring everything from seasonal fruit tarts to rich chocolate fondants.”
UsageCan be used as both a countable and uncountable noun.
Teacher's tipIn British English, 'pudding' or 'sweet' are often used as informal synonyms for this course.
PitfallThe Sahara is a large dessert. The Sahara is a large desert.Do not confuse 'dessert' (sweet food) with 'desert' (dry land). Remember that you want two helpings of dessert, so it has two 's's.
dessert vs desert — Dessert is the sweet course at the end of a meal, while a desert is a dry, sandy region with little water.
Borrowed from Middle French dessert, from desservir (“disserve”), from dés- (“dis-”) and servir (“serve”), thus literally meaning “removal of what has been served”. Note: It was erroneously suggested (e.g. in "Glucose syrups: Technology and Applications" (Peter Hull, 2010)) that the word is derived from the name of Benjamin Delessert, the inventor of beet sugar. However, the term predates him by at least a century.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.