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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

ostracize.

To ban a person from a city for five or ten years through the procedure of ostracism.

9 characters3 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

verb/ˈɒstɹəsaɪz/Received-Pronunciation/ˈɑstɹəˌsaɪz//ˈɒstɹəˌsaɪz/Canada, dialectal/ˈɔstɹəsɑez/Australia
  1. To ban a person from a city for five or ten years through the procedure of ostracism.

    British · English · Oxford · US · historical · transitive
  2. To exclude a person from a community or from society by not communicating with them or by refusing to acknowledge their presence; to refuse to associate with or talk to; to shun.

    British · English · Oxford · US · broadly
Where this word comes from

From Ancient Greek ὀστρακίζω (ostrakízō, “to banish from a city by ostracism”), from ὄστρᾰκον (óstrăkon, “earthenware vessel; fragment of such a vessel, potsherd”) (from the fact that when voting was held to decide whether to banish people, their names were inscribed on potsherds) + -ῐ́ζω (-ĭ́zō, suffix forming verbs)). The English word is cognate with French ostraciser.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.