desolation: a land emptied of life and left a ruin, and the appalled horror that ruin provokes
This is the prophets' word for a country wiped clean of people, herds, and crops, left silent and ruined. It names both the wreckage itself, a place become rubble where no one lives, and the stunned reaction it draws from anyone who passes by. The two go together: a land is made a waste, and so it also becomes a thing of horror that travelers gasp at.
Most often the word describes the sentence God carries out on a guilty nation. Israel, Judah, Egypt, Edom, Moab, Ammon, and others are each warned that their land will be turned into this kind of emptiness. It is the visible proof that judgment has fallen: fields gone to weeds, cities reduced to heaps, the whole region hushed and abandoned.
Because the ruin and the reaction are bound up in one word, English needs several to carry it: waste, devastation, desolation, and sometimes astonishment or horror. The senses below separate the physical wreck from the dread it inspires, but a single verse can hold both at once.