Other forms: alienated, alienating, alienates
To alienate is to turn somebody who was friendly into a stranger. Alienate his supporters, feel alienated, alienate the audience.
It describes losing people you had rather than failing to win them, which is the whole force of the word. In law it has a technical sense: to alienate property is to transfer it to somebody else, which is where the word came from.
1verbalienateTo turn somebody who was friendly into a stranger.
“His rude jokes alienated many of his oldest friends.”
alienate is an estranging.
Latin alienare means to make another's, from alienus, belonging to another, from alius, other.
Latin
aliēnātus
Middle English
alienat — deranged; uncertain; sequestred, secluded
English, today
alienate
Built from
From Middle English alienat (“deranged; uncertain; sequestred, secluded”), from Latin aliēnātus, perfect passive participle of aliēnō (“to estrange, alienate”) (see -ate), from aliēnus. by surface analysis, alien + -ate. See alien, and compare aliene.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA