Other forms: exiled, exiles, exiling
Exile is being made to live away from your own country, with no way back. A poet put on a boat and told never to return, a royal family in a rented house in somebody else's capital, a leader who leaves at night and runs the party by telephone from abroad.
The word covers three things: the state, the stretch of time and the person. He spent thirty years in exile; her exile ended in 1989; the exiles came home when the regime fell. Fixed phrases carry most of the weight — go into exile, be sent into exile, live in exile — and self-imposed exile is leaving before anybody can throw you out. There is a verb as well: the emperor exiled him to an island. People stretch it lightly, calling a dropped footballer exiled from the first team, and it works only because the real thing is so heavy.
1nounexileThe state of being forced to live away from your own country.
“The writer spent the war years in exile.”
synonyms: banishment
2nounperiodThe period somebody spends living away from home in this way.
“His exile lasted nineteen years.”
3nouncannotA person who lives away from their own country and cannot return.
“The café was full of exiles from the old regime.”
4verbforceTo force somebody to leave their country and stay away.
“The government exiled him to a village a thousand miles east.”
Exile came through Middle English exil and Old French essil from Latin exsilium, the state of exile. That word stands on exsul, an exiled person: Latin named the man first and built the name of his condition on top of him.
Latin
exsilium
Old French
essil
Middle English
exil
English, today
exile
Built from
From Middle English exil, borrowed from Old French essil, exil, from Latin exsilium, exilium (“state of exile”), derived from exsul, exul (“exiled person”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Politics & Society