Outborn

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Moved, carried, or expressed outwardly. not-comparable

    "But before a man was created upon the earth, or ever a wild beast had roamed over its surface, the vegetable kindom was the highest form of spiritual life, for, as has been shown, they have no life of their own; but were then the outborn expressions of human principles in some pre-existing world;"

  2. 2
    Foreign; not native. dated, not-comparable

    "It has its sublimity, that emotion, and its reason, though we cannot share it; and it is only in asking ourselves why a man of any nation, any race, should so glory in its greatness or even its goodness, when he has the greatness, the goodness of all humanity to glory in, that we are sensible of the limitations of this outborn Englishman."

  3. 3
    Born at a different location than the facility at which treatment is available. not-comparable

    "Moreover, the largest single group of infants who were outborn admissions lived more than fifty miles from the nursery."

  4. 4
    Arising from or motivated by external sources, as opposed to being instinctual or intrinsically rewarding not-comparable

    "When the shadows followed the sundown, Domino would go forth in his daily quest for food, just as all his forebears had done, prompted as they were by the inborn though called instinct, and the outborn from his cubhood's training."

Example

More examples

"But before a man was created upon the earth, or ever a wild beast had roamed over its surface, the vegetable kindom was the highest form of spiritual life, for, as has been shown, they have no life of their own; but were then the outborn expressions of human principles in some pre-existing world;"

Etymology

From out- + born.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.