on the outside, looking in
Word Rarity
Common
Frequency: Zipf frequency 5.07 in modern English
30
Scrabble Score
21
Letters
3
Syllables
12
Unique Chars
Meaning
prep_phrase
Excluded from a group, process, or opportunity, and feeling downhearted as a result.
Example Sentences
- "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."