expatriation
1 CulturalExplanation
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."
Vocabulary lists containing expatriation
Not Your Father's Word List: Pater, Patr
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Citizenship and Civil Rights
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U.S. Government - Middle School and High School
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Pelak and Reed are a few of the more than 1,000 volunteers on a Slack group called AFG Expatriation, many of whom served on combat deployments and humanitarian relief missions.
From Seattle Times • Aug. 26, 2021
Expatriation is the legal process by which a loss of citizenship occurs.
From Textbooks • Jan. 1, 2016
In 2010, when he was a senator from Massachusetts, Brown co-sponsored the Terrorist Expatriation Act with former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman.
From BusinessWeek • Sep. 4, 2014
The upshot: Expatriation is a bad strategy for coping with past noncompliance.
From The Wall Street Journal • May 19, 2012
But that abandoning of their Country, or Expatriation, as it may be termed, the Object of which is a Change of the Emigrants Condition, is more to be considered, being more numerous.
From Advice to the people in general, with regard to their health by Tissot, S. A. D. (Samuel Auguste David)
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.