ostracise
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Forms: form: ostracises
form: ostracising
form: ostracised
form: ostracised
Senses: examples: text: You then moſt Noble Equivocations and Alluſions, whom Rhetorick would Oſtraciſe, ſeek Revenge for your Baniſhment; [...]
ref: 1704, [Antoine Furetière], “Bombast’s Speech to His Army”, in The Rebellion: Or, An Account of the Late Civil-wars, in the Kingdom of Eloquence, London: Printed [for John Nutt ...], →OCLC, page 48:
text: The inflexible advocate[s] of the people's rights, were either expelled the Senate Chamber, ostracised, or immolated on the reeking altars of patriotism, by the encrimsoned sword of slaughtering persecution.
ref: 1811 July 4, Henry A[lexander] S[cammell] Dearborn, An Oration, Pronounced at Boston, on the Fourth Day of July, 1811, before the Supreme Executive and in the Presence of the Bunker-Hill Association, Boston, Mass.: Printed by Munroe & French, printer to the state, →OCLC, pages 4–5:
text: Republics have been accused of being ungrateful. Aristides was ostracised for being called the Just, and Themistocles banished, after saving his country from desolation.
ref: 1836 December 15, Eleazer Wheelock Ripley, “The President’s Message”, in Register of Debates in Congress, Comprising the Leading Debates and Incidents of the Second Session of the Twenty-fourth Congress: […] (United States House of Representatives), volume XIII, Washington, D.C.: Printed and published by Gales and Seaton, published 1837, →OCLC, column 1097:
text: [T]he person who was ostracised was obliged to leave Athens within ten days after the sentence, and unless a vote of the people recalled him before the expiration of that time, to stay in exile for ten years.
ref: 1840, “OSTRACISM”, in [George Long], editor, The Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, volumes XVII (Organ–Pertinax), London: Charles Knight and Co., […], →OCLC, page 55, column 2:
text: [O]thers may wonder at the mawkish taste of a community which, instead of ostracising such a palpable charlatan at once, attended and praised all that he had to say!
ref: 1841, Anthony Grumbler [pseudonym; David Hoffman], chapter VII, in Miscellaneous Thoughts on Men, Manners, and Things, Baltimore, Md.: Published by Plaskitt & Cugle, →OCLC, page 179:
text: The Athenian Hyperbolus, who had been ostracised some years before by the coalition of Nikias and Alkibiadês, together with their respective partisans—ostracised (as Thucydidês tells us) not from any fear of his power and over-ascendent influence, but from his bad character and from his being a disgrace to the city—and thus ostracised by an abuse of the institution—was now resident at Samos.
ref: 1851, George Grote, “Twenty-first Year of the War.—Oligarchy of Four Hundred at Athens.”, in History of Greece, 2nd edition, volume VIII, London: John Murray, […], part II, page 37:
text: No party worthy of the name will submit, permanently, to any regime which ostracises its best men and selects the worst, which has become an epidemic condition of party politics, and may take off most of what is worth recognizing in the pride of our boasted institutions.
ref: 1852 August, “Death of Henry Clay: The Convention System”, in Democratic Review, volume II, number II (New Series; volume XXXI, number CLXX, overall), New York, N.Y.: Published at the office of the Democratic Review, […], →OCLC, page 151, column 1:
text: I long to be one with the birds and trees and with the green earth. The call comes to me from the air to sing, but, wretched creature that I am, I lecture—and by doing it, I ostracise myself from this great world of songs to which I was born.
ref: 1921 March 18, Rabindranath Tagore, “New York, March 18, 1921”, in C[harles] F[reer] A[ndrews], editor, Letters from Abroad, Madras, Tamil Nadu: S. Ganesan publisher, […], published 1924, →OCLC, page 86:
text: A common practice by established parties in liberal democracies that often accompanies delegitimisation efforts is ostracising a challenger party. In this book's first chapter we have defined ostracising a party as systematically ruling out all political cooperation with that party [...].
ref: 2018, Joost van Spanje, “Pariah Parties: Established Parties’ Systematic Boycotting of Other Parties”, in Controlling the Electoral Marketplace: How Established Parties Ward off Competition (Political Campaigning and Communication), Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, Springer Nature, →DOI, →ISBN, pages 37–38:
glosses: Non-Oxford British English standard spelling of ostracize.
Derived terms: ostracisation