Stranger

How to spell stranger

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce stranger

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does stranger mean?

1. nounA person one does not know or has never met.
2. adjectiveThe comparative form of strange: more unusual, odd, or surprising than something else.

Stranger in a sentence

• noun

  A complete stranger returned the wallet she had dropped at the station.

• adjective

  The second account of the accident was even stranger than the first.

• noun

  The children are taught never to accept a lift from a stranger.

• adjective

  Truth is often stranger than any fiction a writer could invent.

Where does stranger come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin extraneus, meaning 'external' or 'belonging to the outside', which itself was built on extra, meaning 'outside' or 'beyond'. That Latin adjective passed into Old French as estrange, meaning 'foreign' or 'unfamiliar', and the related noun estrangier described a foreigner or outsider. English borrowed the noun in the 1300s, originally for a person from another country or town, before it broadened to mean anyone one simply does not know. The same extraneus root still lives openly in the modern English word 'extraneous', and the buried 'extra' helps explain why the spelling keeps that hard g sound from the older 'strange'. The comparative adjective sense, meaning 'more strange', is a separate development, formed in English by adding the ordinary -er ending to 'strange'.

How the word is built

• strang- (from Latin extraneus: foreign, outside)
• -er (agent/comparative suffix)