ostracize

Valid in Scrabble

Scrabble points
20
Words With Friends
21
Letters
9
Pronunciation
/ˈɒstɹəsaɪz/
See all 5 pronunciations
/ˈɒstɹəsaɪz/ · /ˈɑstɹəˌsaɪz/ · /ˈɒstɹəˌsaɪz/ · /ˈɔstɹəsɑez/ · [ˈɔ̟stɹəsɑe̯z]

Definition of ostracize

2 senses · 1 part of speech · etymology included

verb

  1. (British, English, Oxford, US, historical, transitive)To ban a person from a city for five or ten years through the procedure of ostracism.
    “Republics have been accused of being ungrateful. Aristides was ostracised for being called the Just, and Themistocles banished, after saving his country from desolation.”
    “[T]he person who was ostracised was obliged to leave Athens within ten days after the sentence, and unless a vote of the people recalled him before the expiration of that time, to stay in exile for ten years.”
    “The Athenian Hyperbolus, who had been ostracized some years before by the coalition of Nikias and Alkibiades, together with their respective partisans—ostracized (as Thucydides tells us) not from any fear of his power and over-transcendent influence, but from his bad character and from his being a disgrace to the city—and thus ostracized by an abuse of the institution—was now resident at Samos.”
See all 2 definitions

verb

  1. (British, English, Oxford, US, historical, transitive)To ban a person from a city for five or ten years through the procedure of ostracism.
    “Republics have been accused of being ungrateful. Aristides was ostracised for being called the Just, and Themistocles banished, after saving his country from desolation.”
    “[T]he person who was ostracised was obliged to leave Athens within ten days after the sentence, and unless a vote of the people recalled him before the expiration of that time, to stay in exile for ten years.”
    “The Athenian Hyperbolus, who had been ostracized some years before by the coalition of Nikias and Alkibiades, together with their respective partisans—ostracized (as Thucydides tells us) not from any fear of his power and over-transcendent influence, but from his bad character and from his being a disgrace to the city—and thus ostracized by an abuse of the institution—was now resident at Samos.”
  2. (British, English, Oxford, US, broadly)To exclude a person from a community or from society by not communicating with them or by refusing to acknowledge their presence; to refuse to associate with or talk to; to shun.
    “You then moſt Noble Equivocations and Alluſions, whom Rhetorick would Oſtraciſe, ſeek Revenge for your Baniſhment; [...]”
    “The inflexible advocate[s] of the people's rights, were either expelled the Senate Chamber, ostracised, or immolated on the reeking altars of patriotism, by the encrimsoned sword of slaughtering persecution.”
    “[O]thers may wonder at the mawkish taste of a community which, instead of ostracising such a palpable charlatan at once, attended and praised all that he had to say!”
    “No party worthy of the name will submit, permanently, to any regime which ostracises its best men and selects the worst, which has become an epidemic condition of party politics, and may take off most of what is worth recognizing in the pride of our boasted institutions.”
    “Fashion not only sustains bad writers, but ostracizes and banishes good ones. [William] Shakespeare's writings were popular while he lived, but almost forgotten for two centuries after his death.”

Definitions from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA.

Etymology

From Ancient Greek ὀστρακίζω (ostrakízō, “to banish from a city by ostracism”), from ὄστρᾰκον (óstrăkon, “earthenware vessel; fragment of such a vessel, potsherd”) (from the fact that when voting was held to decide whether to banish people, their names were inscribed on potsherds) + -ῐ́ζω (-ĭ́zō, suffix forming verbs)). The English word is cognate with French ostraciser.

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