drought
Pluraldroughts
- 1A long stretch of time with much less rain than usual, lasting longer and doing more harm than a simple dry spell.
Reservoir levels fell sharply as the drought stretched into its third month.
Severe droughts can force entire communities to ration water.
Oppositeflood
Note
At heart the word is dry plus an old abstract-noun suffix: Old English drūgaþ, matched by Dutch droogte, meant simply 'dryness'. It works two ways in a sentence. Counted, it names one episode: a village can face a drought twice. Uncounted, it names a state a region is in, as in caught in severe drought, with no article. Use the article for an event with a start and an end, and the bare noun for a condition.
- 2A longer than expected stretch without success, especially a team's or player's run of losses or poor results in sport.
The striker's goal drought stretched to eleven games before he finally scored.
Investors endured a drought of profitable quarters before the market finally turned.
Note
The rainfall word stretched to sport, and it brings the logic of the weather sense along. A drought is something a player goes through. It is counted in games or minutes, as in a ten-game drought, and a single win or goal ends it, the way rain does. Losing streak is its near synonym and winning streak its opposite. Drought fits best when something simply fails to arrive, such as goals or wins.
- 3The condition of dryness, aridity, or parching dry heat treated as a quality in itself.
The traveler's throat was parched by the drought of the desert air.
The seasons most unfavourable to the crop are those of excessive drought or excessive rain.
1817, Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of NationsNote
The older use names the dryness itself, not a season of it. That is why the King James Bible of 1611 can set the drought that consumed by day against the frost by night. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations weighs excessive drought against excessive rain as two kinds of weather. When reading older prose, take it as a condition. When writing today, use dryness or aridity for this meaning.
Practice
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Origin
It comes from Middle English droghte, from Old English drūgaþ, and is related to Dutch droogte and Low German Dröögde. It can be understood as "dry" plus a suffix that forms abstract nouns.