Outcast

How to spell outcast

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce outcast

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does outcast mean?

1. nounA person who has been rejected or excluded from a society or group.
2. adjectiveRejected or driven out from a community or home.

Outcast in a sentence

• noun

  After the scandal he felt like an outcast at his own company.

• adjective

  The outcast family wandered from town to town seeking shelter.

• noun

  The novel follows a lonely outcast who is shunned by the whole village.

• adjective

  He lived an outcast existence on the edge of the city.

Where does outcast come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This word formed in Middle English from the adverb 'out' and 'cast', the past participle of the verb 'casten', meaning 'to throw'. That verb itself came into English from Old Norse 'kasta', which the Vikings used for throwing or hurling something away. So an outcast is literally someone who has been thrown out, cast away from a group or community. The image was vivid and physical at first, a person flung beyond the boundaries of society, and by the 1300s it had settled into its modern figurative sense of a rejected or shunned person. The same 'cast' element survives in everyday words like 'broadcast' (originally seed thrown widely) and 'forecast', which keeps the spelling simple and transparent: just 'out' joined to 'cast', with no hidden letters.

How the word is built

• out- (out, away)
• cast (thrown, from the verb to cast)