Alienated

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Experiencing a sense of isolation or estrangement from a group or society ; having ownership or rights legally transferred to another person or entity
2. Feeling separated emotionally or socially from people around oneself ; the act of legally giving up property or rights to someone else
3. Being emotionally detached or excluded from a community or group ; the process of formally assigning property, rights, or interests to another party

Etymology: The verb "alienate" is the root here, and its oldest English sense was not about social distance at all. In Middle English it could mean "deranged" or "sequestered," a sense that survives in the older adjective "alienate," used of a mind that had become estranged from reason. The idea of losing one's mental balance and the idea of being cut off from others sit very close together in the word's history. The Latin source is "aliēnāre," meaning to make something belong to another, or to estrange. It was built from "aliēnus," "belonging to another," which is also the ancestor of "alien." So the core notion is transfer or separation: something that once was yours becomes someone else's, or a person becomes a stranger to you. The legal sense of handing property over to another owner is the most direct survival of that Latin meaning, while the emotional sense of feeling estranged from a group developed from the same idea of being made other.

Synonyms: isolated, estranged, separated, distanced, disaffected

Antonyms: included, accepted, integrated, reconciled, connected