Foreigner

How to spell foreigner

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce foreigner

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does foreigner mean?

1. nounA person who belongs to or comes from a country other than one's own.

Foreigner in a sentence

• As a foreigner in the city, she needed a translator for the legal forms.

• The hotel offered a special rate to every foreigner visiting during the festival.

Where does foreigner come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin foras and foris, both meaning 'outside' or 'out of doors', which sit at the root of the idea of something belonging beyond one's own home or borders. From this came the Old French forain, meaning 'outer' or 'strange', which English borrowed in the 1300s as 'foreign', describing anything from another country or simply outside one's own. The unusual spelling, with its silent 'g' and the 'ei' that does not match the way the word sounds, was actually added later by scholars who wrongly assumed a link to the Latin foris and to the word 'sovereign', so the 'g' is a learned insertion rather than an original sound. The personal noun 'foreigner', meaning a person from another country, was formed by adding the agent suffix -er to 'foreign', and it appears in English from the 1400s onward. The very same foras root survives in the word 'forest', originally land lying outside the enclosed parks, and in 'forfeit', literally something done beyond the rules. The silent 'g' and the unexpected 'eign' ending are exactly the traps that catch adults who write the word by ear.

How the word is built

• foreign (from Latin foras: outside, out of doors)
• -er (noun suffix denoting a person)