| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| alien |
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| SYLLABICATION: | a·li·en |
| PRONUNCIATION: |    l - n, lyn |
| ADJECTIVE: | 1. Owing political allegiance to another country or government; foreign: alien residents. 2. Belonging to, characteristic of, or constituting another and very different place, society, or person; strange. See synonyms at foreign. 3. Dissimilar, inconsistent, or opposed, as in nature: emotions alien to her temperament. | | NOUN: | 1. An unnaturalized foreign resident of a country. Also called noncitizen. 2. A person from another and very different family, people, or place. 3. A person who is not included in a group; an outsider. 4. A creature from outer space: science fiction about an invasion of aliens. 5. Ecology An organism, especially a plant or animal, that occurs in or is naturalized in a region to which it is not native. | | TRANSITIVE VERB: | Inflected forms: a·li·ened, a·li·en·ing, a·li·ens
Law To transfer (property) to another; alienate. | | ETYMOLOGY: | Middle English, from Old French, from Latin alinus, from alius, other. See al-1 in Appendix I.
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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