MEANING
Treating people as fundamentally different outsiders who do not fully belong to a group.
Use it for
describing how a group excludes outsiders; analyzing language that makes people seem alien; examining the construction of us versus them; explaining how belonging is deniedNames the social process of constructing people as outsiders rather than merely identifying differences. Writing functions: Analysis / Interpretation.
Words that belong together
- process of othering
- racial othering
- othering of migrants
On the page
The novel’s alternating narrators expose the othering of people who speak the minority language.
Descriptions of rural voters as a single irrational mass can reproduce the othering that the analysis claims to oppose.
Word forms
- Base
- othering
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Usage notes
Usually uncountable as a process noun. The headword is a lexicalized noun, not a separate conjugated form added alongside a matching verb. Register: academic. Commonness: moderately common in humanities and social science (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
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