Exile

How to spell exile

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce exile

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does exile mean?

1. nounA long period of enforced or voluntary absence from one's own country, or a person living in such absence.
2. verbTo expel and bar someone from their native country, usually as a punishment.

Exile in a sentence

• noun

  The deposed leader spent twenty years in exile abroad.

• verb

  The court chose to exile the rebel rather than imprison him.

• noun

  The poet lived in exile after criticising the government.

• verb

  The new rulers planned to exile anyone who opposed them.

Where does exile come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Exile comes from the Latin exilium, meaning 'banishment', which itself rests on the noun exsul, a person forced to live outside their own country. The exsul element joins the prefix ex-, meaning 'out of' or 'away from', with a root tied to wandering or being driven from the soil, so the literal picture is of someone pushed beyond their homeland. The word travelled into English in the 1200s through Old French exil and essil, keeping both the sense of the punishment and the person who suffers it. Over time English settled on a single spelling that hides the original ex- prefix inside the smooth-sounding 'ex-ile', which is why writers sometimes pause over whether it needs a double letter (it does not). A useful memory hook is that exile shares the same ex- 'out' beginning as 'exit' and 'export', all of them describing movement outward.

How the word is built

• ex- (out, away)
• -ile (from Latin exilium/exsul: banished wanderer)