Which desert contains the world's largest hot-sand desert, the Rub' al Khali?

The Arabian Desert contains the Rub' al Khali, the world's largest continuous sand desert.

Rub' al Khali means “Empty Quarter” in Arabic. It occupies roughly 650,000 square kilometres across parts of Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Although its landscape includes gravel plains and salt flats, enormous dune fields dominate much of the region, with some dunes rising hundreds of metres.

The broader Arabian Desert extends across most of the Arabian Peninsula and is larger than the Empty Quarter alone. The desert's extreme aridity results from subtropical high pressure, continental location, and limited rainfall. Ancient trade routes crossed parts of Arabia, but the Empty Quarter remained difficult to traverse. The Sahara is larger as a hot desert overall, while the Gobi is a cold desert spanning parts of Mongolia and China. Those distinctions explain why the Rub' al Khali is specifically described as the largest continuous sand desert rather than the world's largest desert.