unbelonging
- noun
- /ˌʌnbɪˈlɔŋɪŋ/
- The story explores the unbelonging that immigrants often face in a foreign land.
Examples
-
The title referred to his sense of unbelonging and chronic displacement.
Fiction book (2001) -
Many teenagers experience a sense of unbelonging as they try to find their identity in a new school.
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The narrator begins his story of coming home with a declaration of unbelonging to both his people and his land; the women to whom he is related, his mother and grandmother, do not "mean anything" to him.
Academic text (2001) -
Their precarious lives, their forced sense of unbelonging, their lost wars of rebellion, and the inhuman misery of their expulsion from Spain all demand compassion.
Academic text (1995) -
He picks up speed and seems to lose his gangliness, the slouchy funk of hormones and unbelonging, and all the dumb-hearted things that seal his adolescence.
Fiction book (1992) -
Her feelings of unbelonging made it difficult for her to make friends in the new city.
Synonyms
A state of being alone and cut off from other people physically or emotionally
A sad feeling when you are alone and feel separate from others
Feeling of being alone and separate from other people
A feeling of being strange or not belonging
A state of being separate from other people
Feeling separate from a group or community
Feeling not part of a group or community
A feeling of not being included in a group or activity
A feeling of not being at home or comfortable in a place
A lack of connection between things or people
A feeling of not belonging after leaving home or familiar places
Antonyms
How Included
Surface Forms
Morphology
Etymology
Unbelonging combines un- 'not' and belonging, from belong 'to be part of', and it names the state or feeling of not fitting in or being accepted. So someone feels unbelonging when they have no place in a new school, town, or group.