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caste

UK/kɑːst/US/kæst/
nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #8,735 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: castes

A caste is a fixed social class you are born into. The caste system, caste discrimination, a low caste.

You cannot leave it, which is what separates caste from class. Discrimination on the basis of caste has been unlawful in India since 1950 and persists in practice, and the diaspora has taken the question into British and American courts.

Definitions of caste

  1. 1nouncasteA fixed social class you are born into.B2+

    “In the past, a person's caste decided which jobs they could do and whom they could marry.”

caste is a social class.

Where it comes from

Portuguese casta means lineage or breed, from Latin castus, pure. Portuguese traders applied it in India.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *h₂ǵ-es-

  2. Latin

    castus — chaste"; "chastity

  3. Spanish

    casta — lineage, breed, race

  4. English, today

    caste

Built from

  • casto · Portuguese — chaste
  • *𐌺𐌰𐍃𐍄𐍃 · Gothic — group, collection of animals

Borrowed from Portuguese - or Spanish casta (“lineage, breed, race”), which the OED derives from Portuguese casto (“chaste”), from Latin castus (“chaste"; "chastity”), Coromines (1987) argues instead for a hypothetical Gothic - form 𐌺𐌰𐍃𐍄𐍃 (“group, collection of animals”), cognate with English cast, from Proto-Germanic kastuz, from Proto-Indo-European h₂ǵ-es-.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

caste in the wild

  • The term is often translated approximately in English as caste.

    Jāti

  • Nadar (also referred to as Nadan, Shanar and Shanan) is a Tamil caste of India.

    Nadar (caste)

  • Nadar climbers had faced discrimination from major upper castes in some regions.

    Nadar (caste)

  • Dalits were excluded from the fourfold varna of the caste hierarchy in Hinduism and were seen as forming a fifth varna, also known by the name of Panchama.

    Dalit

  • In modern literature, many castes under the Scheduled Castes category are sometimes referred to as Dalit, meaning "broken" or "dispersed".

    Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the castus family

castechaste

caste — used about once every 3,827 pages · #8,735 · point at the bar for the others

  • castellan