Outlandish

Outlandish

Adjective · /aʊtˈlæn.dɪʃ/

Definition

Looking or sounding bizarre, strange, or unfamiliar; strikingly unusual or unconventional; grotesque or very strange in appearance or style; (archaic) of or from a foreign land; foreign.

Origin

From outland (a foreign country, a land beyond one's borders — from Old English ūtland: ūt, out, and land, land, country) + the suffix -ish (of the nature of, from). Outlandish in its original sense meaning of or pertaining to a foreign land — outlandish customs being the customs of foreign peoples, strange because unfamiliar. The semantic shift occurring because foreign things were perceived as strange — the foreignness becoming generalised into strangeness. By the seventeenth century, the foreign-land sense giving way to the general sense of bizarre, grotesque, or strikingly unconventional that dominates today. A classic example of xenonymy becoming a general word for strangeness.