expatriation

¹ Cultural  

1. Voluntary departure from the nation of one's birth for permanent or prolonged residence in another nation.

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expatriation ² Cultural  

1. Voluntarily leaving the nation of one's birth for permanent or prolonged residence in another country.

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Explanation

Expatriation is the process of leaving your country and living in a new one, or the act of forcing a person to do this. If you decide to pack up your things and move to the remote island nation of Kiribati, that's expatriation. When a fairy tale king banishes a princess from the kingdom, it's one kind of expatriation—you could also call it "exile" or "deportation." Then there's the expatriation that happens when someone chooses to move from one country to another. A U.S. citizen might attend college in Canada, then stay and become a Canadian citizen afterward, for example. Expatriation comes from the French expatrier, "banish," from ex-, "out of," and the Latin patria, "native land."

Example Sentences

In 1921 he joined the wave of expatriation and moved to France.

From The Wall Street Journal • Nov. 7, 2025

These expatriation figures don’t reflect migration but merely show the number of Americans living abroad who have effectively decided to give up any right to move back to the U.S.A.

From MarketWatch • Oct. 19, 2025

He hired a law firm to help him with his expatriation process and prepare his tax returns, along with an appraiser to value his companies.

From Los Angeles Times • Oct. 15, 2025

District Court in Brooklyn, New York, is the latest case by the Justice Department targeting China's apparent expatriation campaign, known as "Operation Fox Hunt."

From Reuters • Oct. 20, 2022

Were princes and peers in our day degraded by working, in their expatriation, with head or hand for bread?

From Recreations of Christopher North, Volume I (of 2) by Wilson, John Lyde