Definition
Excluded from a group, process, or opportunity, and feeling downhearted as a result.
In Context
- "Won't you take me back again? I'll be waiting here till then / On the outside looking in"
- ""In a sense, I've always felt on the outside, looking in," Mr. Douglas says. "It's my background, damn it. My father was an illiterate Russian immigrant, a ragman, the lowest rung on the economic scale. There were six sisters and my mother; I was the only boy. To be a young Jewish boy in a town—Amsterdam, in upstate New York—that was quite anti-Semitic.""
- "A recurrent theme of Theroux's books is this sense of being an alien, on the outside looking in."
- "While China's economy soars, hundreds of millions of migrant workers and rural peasants have been left on the outside looking in."
Also Said As
- alienated
See Also
- on the outs
- want in