A wasteland is land that cannot support life or serve a useful purpose. It might be a stretch of desert where nothing grows, a battlefield left barren after years of war, or an industrial site so polluted that plants won't take root and animals won't live there.

The word suggests emptiness combined with ruin or desolation. A plain might be empty, but a wasteland feels ruined or forsaken. In The Lord of the Rings, Mordor is described as a wasteland: a place where darkness and destruction have made the land itself hostile to life. After a forest fire sweeps through acres of trees, the blackened landscape might look like a wasteland until new growth appears.

People also use wasteland metaphorically to describe something that feels empty or pointless. A student might call summer television a cultural wasteland if all the shows seem mindless and boring. Someone disappointed by a new video game might say it's a wasteland of repetitive tasks. When you call something a wasteland, you're saying it has been reduced to its lowest state, whether literally as damaged earth or figuratively as something that has lost all value or meaning.