oasis [E17th] In the classical world Oasis was the name of a particular fertile spot in the Libyan desert. It came ultimately from an ancient Egyptian word for ‘dwelling place’. By the early 19th century the word was being used for a place of calm in the midst of trouble or bustle. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890), a character describes his richly furnished house as being ‘an oasis of art in the howling desert of South London’.