Outlawe

Part of speech: noun, verb

Definitions

1. A fugitive or banished person who has been stripped of legal protection ; to formally declare a person an offender no longer shielded by the law
2. A person cast out of the protection of the law and hunted as a criminal ; to proclaim someone to be placed beyond the reach of legal safeguards
3. An exile who has been deprived of the law's protection and can be pursued ; to officially pronounce a person excluded from the legal order

Etymology: "Outlawe" is the Middle English spelling of a word that once named a person stripped of the law's protection rather than a criminal in the modern sense. The Old Norse ancestor "útlagi" combined "út" ("out") with "lagu" (the law, the genitive of "lög"), and in medieval Scandinavian society an outlaw was literally put outside the legal community, so that anyone could harm or kill him without penalty. The Anglo-Saxon term "utlaga" came into English with the same legal sense, and the Norse-derived form shows how closely early English law and Scandinavian custom were linked in the Danelaw. The word is a compound with a plain structure: "out" plus "law," with the Norse suffix "-i" marking a person. Its history in English is mostly legal, which is why the word first appears in court records and statutes rather than in romance or adventure. The idea of the outlaw as a heroic rebel came later, shaped by ballads and chronicles about figures such as Robin Hood, which transformed a term for legal exclusion into one for an admirable wrongdoer.