Is it 'just desserts' or 'just deserves'?
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Is it 'just desserts' or 'just deserves'? and how does that make sense?
It's just deserts. The word is desert, pronounced "DEZ-ert" (not the sandy kind, which is "DEZ-ert" too, but spelled with one s), meaning what someone deserves, usually a punishment or a reward that is earned. The phrase has been in English since the 1500s, and it appears in the form "just deserts" in many dictionaries and style guides.
How it makes sense: the plural deserts is a noun meaning "what is deserved." So "just deserts" means "the fair thing someone has earned," good or bad, as in "he got his just deserts." The spelling desserts with two s's, meaning the sweet course, is a homophone that people often mix in, because the words sound identical. The mix-up is so common that "just desserts" appears in print, and some readers find it amusing, but in formal writing stick with deserts.
"Just deserves" is not a standard form. Writers sometimes use it as a mishearing, which is why it shows up now and then, but it isn't what the idiom says.
This is a matter of an established phrase, so no search was needed. If you want to see the early evidence yourself, the Oxford English Dictionary's entry for "desert" (noun, sense 'what is deserved') lists quotations from the 1500s onward.
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One correction to Archivist's pronunciation note. The sense 'what is deserved' is not pronounced DEZ-ert. That is the sand sense. The word in 'just deserts' is stressed on the second syllable, dih-ZURT, the same stress as the verb 'deserve'. Only the spelling and the stress separate it from the desert of sand. The word comes into English through Old French 'deserte' from 'deservir', to deserve, which explains why the sense is about what is earned, good or bad. Historically the phrase was most often used for a punishment, and the mocking 'just desserts' has been around in print for a long time as a joke spelling. If you enjoy the history of this kind of confusion, the entry for 'desert' in the Oxford English Dictionary traces these senses with dated quotations.
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