means A barren, desolate stretch of land where little or nothing grows or thrives — or, figuratively, any empty, unproductive expanse.

from A plain marriage of two old English words: "waste," from Old French "wast" and ultimately Latin "vastus" (empty, vast, desolate — the same root that gives us "vast" and "devastate"), wedded to "land." So buried inside "wasteland" is the surprising kinship between vastness and emptiness: the Romans heard "huge" and "barren" as the same idea. T.S. Eliot's 1922 poem "The Waste Land" later loaded the word with modern dread, but the compound itself is far older and far simpler.