Noun

(historical) In ancient Athens (and some other cities), the temporary banishment by popular vote of a citizen considered dangerous to the state.

* {{quote-book, year=1579, year_published=1898, author=(Thomas North), by=(Plutarch)

, title= Plutarch's Lives , section=Themistocles, volume=2, page=35 , passage= For this manner of banishment for a time, called ostracismos , was no punishment for any fault committed, but a mitigation and taking away of the envy of the people, which delighted to pluck down their stomacks that too much seemed to exceed in greatness:

* {{quote-book, year=1588, year_published=1886, author=

, title= The life and complete works in prose and verse of Robert Greene , chapter=Perimedes the Blacke-Smith, editor=(Alexander Balloch Grosart), volume=7, page=19 , passage=

*, II.32:

*:Witnesse the Ostracisme'' amongst the Athenians, and the ''Petalisme among the Siracusans.

(figuratively) Banishment by some general consent.

* {{quote-book, year=1602—3, year_published=1994, author=(Lady Arbella Stuart)

, title= The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart , publisher=Oxford University Press, location=New York, editor=Sara Jayne Steen, page=171 , passage=If I have deserved the land should spue me out, I will feed my selfe with the idle and windy conceite of an Ostracisme , and my unregarded poore selfe shall be all the richesse and commpany I crave to transport and if a Princes word

Temporary exclusion from a community or society.

Noun

(chiefly, uncountable) The state of being isolated, detached, or separated.

The act of isolating.

(diplomacy, of a country) The state of not having diplomatic relations with other countries (either with most or all other countries, or with specified other countries).

* 1975 , W. Raymond Duncan, “Problems of Cuban Foreign Policy”, chapter 20 of (editor), Cuban Communism , Fifth Edition, Transaction (publisher, 1985), page 486:

As of 1975, diplomatic ostracism is still imposed by the Organization of American States (OAS). The inter-American community also exercises a trade embargo against Cuba. But even within this context of hemispheric isolation , Havana’s diplomacy is strikingly contradictory.

* 1993 September, Jon Brook Wolfsthal, “The Israeli initiative”, in , Volume 49, Number 7, page 8:

Israel could offer to ease North Korea’s isolation' with diplomatic recognition,

* 2009 , Dore Gold, The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West , Regnery Publishing, ISBN 9781596985711, page 49:

It [Europe] now pressed Washington to begin direct talks with Tehran, but Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, Rice’s point man on Iran, still stressed that diplomatic isolation of Iran—and not diplomatic engagement—was the only acceptable approach for dealing with the Iranian nuclear challenge.

(chemistry) The obtaining of an element from one of its compounds, or of a compound from a mixture

(medicine) The separation of a patient, suffering from a contagious disease, from contact with others

(computing) a database property that determines when and how changes made in one transaction are visible to other concurrent transactions