Adjective

(en adjective)

Not expected, anticipated or foreseen.

* , title=The Mirror and the Lamp

, chapter=2 citation , passage=She was a fat, round little woman, richly apparelled in velvet and lace, […]; and the way she laughed, cackling like a hen, the way she talked to the waiters and the maid, […]—all these unexpected phenomena impelled one to hysterical mirth, and made one class her with such immortally ludicrous types as Ally Sloper, the Widow Twankey, or Miss Moucher.}}

*

The windmill presented unexpected difficulties.

Adjective

(er)

Not normal; odd, unusual, surprising, out of the ordinary.

He thought it strange that his girlfriend wore shorts in the winter.

* Milton

Sated at length, erelong I might perceive / Strange alteration in me.

Unfamiliar, not yet part of one's experience.

I moved to a strange town when I was ten.

* Shakespeare

Here is the hand and seal of the duke; you know the character, I doubt not; and the signet is not strange to you.

* 1955 , edition, ISBN 0553249592, pages 48–49:

She's probably sitting there hoping a couple of strange detectives will drop in.

(physics) Having the quantum mechanical property of strangeness.

* 2004 Frank Close, Particle Physics: A Very Short Introduction , Oxford, page 93:

A strange quark is electrically charged, carrying an amount -1/3, as does the down quark.

(obsolete) Belonging to another country; foreign.

* Shakespeare

one of the strange queen's lords

* Ascham

I do not contemn the knowledge of strange and divers tongues.

(obsolete) Reserved; distant in deportment.

* Shakespeare

She may be strange and shy at first, but will soon learn to love thee.

(Nathaniel Hawthorne)

(obsolete) Backward; slow.

* Beaumont and Fletcher

Who, loving the effect, would not be strange / In favouring the cause.

(obsolete) Not familiar; unaccustomed; inexperienced.

* Shakespeare

In thy fortunes am unlearned and strange .