Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective From another part of the world; foreign: synonym: foreign.
  • adjective Intriguingly unusual or different; excitingly strange: synonym: fantastic.
  • adjective Of or involving striptease.
  • noun One that is exotic.
  • noun A striptease performer.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Of foreign origin or character; introduced from a foreign country; not native, naturalized, or familiarized; extraneous: as, an exotic plant; an exotic term or word.
  • noun Anything of foreign origin, as a plant, tree, word, practice, etc., introduced from a foreign country, and not fully acclimated, naturalized, or established in use.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Introduced from a foreign country; not native; extraneous; foreign
  • noun Anything of foreign origin; something not of native growth, as a plant, a word, a custom.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Foreign, with the connotation of excitingly foreign.
  • adjective Non-native to the ecosystem.
  • noun biology An organism that is exotic to an environment.
  • noun An exotic dancer; a stripteaser.
  • noun physics Any exotic particle.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective strikingly strange or unusual
  • adjective being or from or characteristic of another place or part of the world

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin exōticus, from Greek exōtikos, from exō, outside; see exo–.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin exoticus, from ἐξωτικός (eksotikos, "foreign"), literally "from the outside", from ἐξω- (ekso, "outside"), from ἐξ (eks, "out of").

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  • Seen here.

    June 19, 2009