Exotic means excitingly foreign and unfamiliar. An exotic holiday, exotic fruit, somewhere exotic.
The word describes the speaker's viewpoint rather than the thing: nothing is exotic in its own country, which is why calling a person exotic is now generally avoided as it treats them as a spectacle. Of plants and animals, exotic simply means non-native, and that is a neutral technical use. Note exotica; and that exotic dancer is a euphemism, which has coloured the word further.
1adjectiveexoticExcitingly foreign and unfamiliar.
“The market was full of exotic fruits I had never seen before.”
2adjectivenativeNot native to a place.
“About a third of the exotic species there have escaped from gardens.”
exotic is a quality of foreignness.
Greek exotikos means foreign, from exo, outside. The word has always meant from outside, and every implication of glamour or strangeness English added on top of a plainly geographical Greek adjective.
Ancient Greek
ἐξωτικός — foreign
Latin
exōticus
Middle French
exotique
English, today
exotic
Built from
Borrowed from Middle French exotique, from Latin exōticus, from Ancient Greek ἐξωτικός (“foreign”) literally “from the outside”, from ἐξω- (“outside”), from ἐξ (“out of”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Sharper Adjectives