1 Definition
To exclude someone from a group or society, often deliberately and as a form of punishment or social rejection.
2 In Use
After the scandal broke, her old friends quietly began to ostracize her from every gathering.
3 Word Origin
ostrakon Gk. · potsherd, tile → ostrakizein Gk. · to banish by vote → ostracize 17th c. English
Ostracize descends from the Greek ostrakon, meaning a broken piece of pottery or tile, and the related verb ostrakizein, to banish by vote. In Athens, citizens would scratch the name of a person they wished to exile onto a shard of pottery and cast it into a public vote. If enough votes accumulated against one name, that person was sent away from the city for ten years, regardless of any formal crime. The word entered English in the seventeenth century, gradually loosening from its literal political ritual to describe any deliberate act of social exclusion.
💡Fun Fact
The Athenian practice behind this word was less about punishing wrongdoing and more about managing political rivalry, since a vote could banish even a popular or powerful citizen simply because others feared his growing influence. No formal charge or trial was required, only enough broken pottery bearing the same name. Archaeologists have actually recovered caches of these ancient ostraka, some inscribed with the names of well known statesmen, offering a rare physical trace of a process we now use only in the figurative, social sense. Today the word rarely involves pottery, but the sting of being deliberately left out has changed very little.
