Outsiders

How to spell outsiders

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce outsiders

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does outsiders mean?

1. nounPeople who do not belong to a particular group, organisation, or community.
2. nounCompetitors or contenders thought to have little chance of winning.

Outsiders in a sentence

• The small village rarely welcomed outsiders to its annual meetings.

• The bookmakers listed both horses as rank outsiders before the race.

• The committee was reluctant to share its plans with outsiders.

• The underfunded team were clear outsiders for the championship.

Where does outsiders come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built from two very old Germanic pieces that survived into modern English. The core noun 'side' descends from the Old English 'side', meaning the flank or edge of a body or thing, and is related to similar words across the Germanic languages. Adding 'out', from Old English 'ut' meaning 'away' or 'beyond', produced 'outside', the region beyond a boundary, recorded from the 1500s. From there 'outsider' grew in the early 1800s to name a person standing beyond a group, and the plural simply adds the regular 's'. The spelling holds no surprises once you see its honest construction: out plus side plus the agent ending plus the plural, with no doubled letters or silent traps.

How the word is built

• out- (external)
• side (Old English side, flank)
• -er (agent/person noun)
• -s (plural)