Exotic
/ɪɡˈzɑtɪk/adjective
Coming from a distant country, or strikingly unusual in a way that suggests one.
The Greek roots
Literally: “belonging to the outside”
The story of the word
The Greek adjective was flat and administrative: outer, external, an outsider at a gathering. Latin exoticus attached it to imported goods, and English used it from the 1590s for plants and animals brought from abroad, so a hothouse of foreign specimens was exotic long before anything was exotic in the glamorous sense. The stripper meaning came out of American nightclub advertising in the 1940s through the phrase exotic dancer, a euphemism that worked precisely because the word still sounded botanical.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1590s
Same family
In a sentence
The nursery sells exotics that will not survive a Manchester winter outdoors.
He described his home town as exotic, which surprised everyone who lived there.