The word desertification has a Latin origin: -fication, which means the action of doing (or creating) comes from fieri, the passive form of the verb facere, to do, while desert is derived from both the adjective desertus, meaning uninhabited, and the noun desertum, a desert area.

Quoting Budge, El-Baz (1988) wrote:
The word desert originated as an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph pronounced tesert, meaning a place that was forsaken or left behind... From this came the Latin verb desere, to abandon. From the latter came desertum, a waste place or wilderness, and desertus, meaning abandoned or relinquished. This in itself implies that the desert had [once] been a better place. In it, there was life - in some places teeming life.

There was much vegetation, grasses and trees, many animals and human beings. Then something happened, and the place became a wasteland; it was deserted. In a wider sense, desertification can signify an environmental crisis which produces desert-like conditions or desert-like landscapes in any ecosystem. In its global and practical sense it means a set of actions, the consequences of which are the degradation of the vegetation cover and of the soils.