Ostracize

Quick meaning: Ostracize is a verb meaning (transitive, Ancient Greece, historical) To ban a person from a city for five or ten years through the procedure of ostracism.

Meaning

(transitive, Ancient Greece, historical) To ban a person from a city for five or ten years through the procedure of ostracism.

More Meanings

1. (by extension) 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.

Example Sentences

You then moſt Noble Equivocations and Alluſions, whom Rhetorick would Oſtraciſe, ſeek Revenge for your Baniſhment; [...]

[O]thers may wonder at the mawkish taste of a community which, instead of ostracising such a palpable charlatan at once, attended and praised all that he had to say!

Republics have been accused of being ungrateful. Aristides was ostracised for being called the Just, and Themistocles banished, after saving his country from desolation.

Fashion not only sustains bad writers, but ostracizes and banishes good ones. [William] Shakespeare's writings were popular while he lived, but almost forgotten for two centuries after his death.

Word Forms

• ostracizes
• ostracizing
• ostracized
• ostracise

Synonyms for ostracize

Depending on context, synonyms include blackball, leper, brush off, discount, disregard, dissemble.

Antonyms for ostracize

Common opposites include attend, clock, consider, heed, mark, mind.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include blackball, banish, shun, ban, ostracise, ostricize.

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