Alienated

How to spell alienated

9 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce alienated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does alienated mean?

1. verbCaused someone to feel isolated or hostile, or turned them against you.
2. adjectiveFeeling isolated, estranged, or no longer connected to others.

Alienated in a sentence

• verb

  His constant criticism alienated his closest colleagues.

• adjective

  Many staff felt alienated after the abrupt restructuring.

• verb

  The new policy alienated the very customers it was meant to attract.

• adjective

  Working remotely for years left him increasingly alienated from the team.

Where does alienated come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin alienus, meaning 'belonging to another' or 'foreign', which itself grew from alius, simply 'other'. From that root came the verb alienare, 'to make something the property of another' and so 'to estrange or turn away', and its past participle alienatus gave English the verb 'alienate'. The form arrived through legal and ecclesiastical Latin in the 1400s and 1500s, first carrying the property-law sense of transferring ownership, before broadening to the emotional sense of driving people apart. The very same alienus underlies the everyday word 'alien', a useful reminder that the spelling keeps the full -lien- of its Latin parent rather than collapsing into 'alein'. Remembering that an alienated person has been made to feel like an 'alien' is a tidy way to lock in the order of the letters.

How the word is built

• alien- (from Latin alienus: belonging to another, foreign)
• -ate (verb-forming suffix)
• -ed (past tense/participle)