outcast

outcast n Outcast, castaway, derelict, reprobate, pariah, untouchable are comparable when they mean one who has lost contact with or has been excluded from association with men in general or with a particular group.

Outcast is usually applied to a person who has been rejected by society and is forced to live without its help, its companionship, or its approval; the term need not imply a degraded or abject condition, but it does suggest a loss of the comforts that accrue from one's association with other men

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the casual offender expiates his offense . . . and after devastating years is given back an outcast to the society that made him— Cardozo

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Arnold the heartbroken outcast from the snug household of faith— Montague

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Castaway usually implies abandonment as the result of shipwreck and suggests the wretched and pitiable condition of one isolated from both human society and normal human comforts

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took part ... in that passage through the Straits of Gibraltar which landed him as a castaway on the Portuguese coast— Sellery

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a pitiful wreck of an old man he had picked up ... a castaway Englishman, Henry Atkins by name— Cather

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Derelict basically applies to property and especially to a ship abandoned and left to the mercy of the elements. In application to human beings the term emphasizes a cutting off from normal social association particularly because of irresponsible or dissolute habits and more often than outcast or castaway suggests a debased state more or less voluntarily assumed

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chronic ne'er-do-wells, useless derelicts of society, seldom hired and then not for long— F. L. Allen

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strange things happen on a racetrack where human derelicts and equine aristocrats fashion bonds . . . beyond the comprehension of the outside world— Gerald Beaumont

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Reprobate basically applies to one who, because of his sins, in rejected by God. In extended use reprobate is more likely to imply the disappro-bation of society than actual rejection by society, and, while it may impute grave wrongdoing, it is very likely to suggest a degree of social tolerance

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may paint his hero as a gay, devil-may-care reprobate, striding to the gallows with a twinkle in his eye— Pawley

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an old reprobate who acted as medicine man, astrologer, doctor, wizard, rainmaker— Birtles

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Pariah and untouchable are words basically used to denote specific socially inferior or unacceptable groups in India but in their more general applications often used without reference to the original meaning.

Pariah in such general application typically denotes a person who especially as a member of a group is, justifiably or unjustifiably, rejected or despised by society

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with us, prison makes a man a pariah. I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to air and sun— Wilde

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many virile minds dare not speak out for fear of . . . becoming political pariahs—L. L. Rice

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a man who had disgraced himself in battle was a pariah in his native land— Dickinson

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hundreds of thousands of lepers still exist throughout the world as social pariahs— Heiser

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Untouchable is applicable not only to an individual but to a group (as a people, nation, or class) which another and supposedly superior group regards as beneath its notice or outside the sphere of its consideration

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those in Whitehall may go on thinking there is something extremely meritorious in treating Russia as a diplomatic untouchable— Daily Express

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that former untouchable of the Atlantic, the Tourist-Class passenger— Sutton

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Analogous words: *vagabond, vagrant, tramp, hobo