Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

outsider

UK/ˌaʊtˈsaɪdəɹ/US/ˌaʊtˈsaɪdəɹ/
nounC1Common in everyday speech and writing · #5,471 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: outsiders

An outsider is somebody who does not belong to the group. Feel like an outsider, an outsider's view, a rank outsider.

It can be a disadvantage or an advantage: an outsider sees what the insiders have stopped noticing, which is why organisations hire them. In racing an outsider is a horse nobody expects to win, and the odds say so.

Definitions of outsider

  1. 1nounoutsiderSomebody who does not belong to the group.C1

    “As the only new girl in the class, she felt like an outsider for months.”

outsider is a person.

Where it comes from

From outside + -er.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

outsider in the wild

  • The term outsider art was coined in 1972 as the title of a book by art critic Roger Cardinal.

    Outsider art

  • A more specific term, "outsider music", was later adapted for musicians.

    Outsider art

  • By contrast, outsider art (art brut) denotes works from a similar context but which have only minimal contact with the mainstream art world.

    Naïve art

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.