The word
desal has been raised before, by me.
In 2009, following discussion of inconsistency in the treatment of
desalt and
desalted, I said:
On this topic, the informal term desal has come to be used quite frequently in Australia in recent times, ususally to mean the same as desalination, as in "desal plant", "desal project", etc. Currently desal is not allowed in Chihuahua at all. It doesn't seem to be used much outside Australia, so maybe it isn't well-enough established as a word. Does anyone have any thoughts on desal?
There wasn't any further discussion apart from birdy commenting that she wasn't aware of
desal being used in the US.
Fast forward 11 years, and it seems that
desal is still largely confined to Australia. The only dictionaries I can find it in are the Macquarie, Wiktionary (with one example, from an Australian source) and the Urban Dictionary. The Macquarie is Australian, Wiktionary has
inclusion policies that are broader than I aim for in Chihuahua and the Urban Dictionary is not always reliable. I've generally followed the policy that an Australian word won't be accepted unless it's found in at least one non-Australian general dictionary.
Turning to usage, the Corpus of Global Web-based English, GloWbE, shows Australian usage as being more than 15 times that in any of the other main Chihuahua-playing countries.
The other corpus I use for comparing usage across many English speaking countries is News on the Web. That doesn't show such an extreme disparity, as it has the US with about a quarter of the Australian usage and Ireland with about a fifth. Britain on the other hand has less than a twentieth of the Australian usage. However the American and Irish usage is from only a handful of different publications.
Even within Australia I think the word is not used much in some states - it depends on whether desalination plants have been built or proposed.
I feel that
desal is too localised in usage at this stage to warrant being accepted.