ESTRANGEMENT

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does estrangement mean? 

• ESTRANGEMENT (noun)
  The noun ESTRANGEMENT has 2 senses:

1. separation resulting from hostility

2. the feeling of being alienated from other people

  Familiarity information: ESTRANGEMENT used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ESTRANGEMENT (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Separation resulting from hostility

Classified under:

Nouns denoting stable states of affairs

Synonyms:

alienation; estrangement

Hypernyms ("estrangement" is a kind of...):

isolation (a state of separation between persons or groups)

Derivation:

estrange (arouse hostility or indifference in where there had formerly been love, affection, or friendliness)

Sense 2

Meaning:

The feeling of being alienated from other people

Classified under:

Nouns denoting feelings and emotions

Synonyms:

alienation; disaffection; estrangement

Hypernyms ("estrangement" is a kind of...):

dislike (a feeling of aversion or antipathy)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "estrangement"):

isolation (a feeling of being disliked and alone)

Derivation:

estrange (remove from customary environment or associations)

 Context examples 

It was this neglect upon my part which led to an estrangement between us, and drove her into habits for which it is I who am to blame and not she.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

There they exchanged again those feelings and those promises which had once before seemed to secure everything, but which had been followed by so many, many years of division and estrangement.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

He experienced no suffering from estrangement—no yearning after reconciliation; and though, more than once, my fast falling tears blistered the page over which we both bent, they produced no more effect on him than if his heart had been really a matter of stone or metal.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connexions can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connexion can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

The cessation from writing and studying, the death of Brissenden, and the estrangement from Ruth had made a big hole in his life; and his life refused to be pinned down to good living in cafes and the smoking of Egyptian cigarettes.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

It was a perpetual estrangement.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

I had entreated him to keep quite clear of the house till everything was arranged: and, indeed, the bare idea of the commotion, at once sordid and trivial, going on within its walls sufficed to scare him to estrangement.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)