Sociofugal
adj ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Of a place, etc.: involving the arrangement of a group of people so that each person can maintain some privacy from the others.
"By sociofugality I mean a design which prevents or discourages the formation of stable human relationships. […] Sociofugal buildings do not encourage interpersonal relationships and when group relationships occur they are of the shoulder-to-shoulder type found in a crowd or, when modified by discipline, in the regimented group. […] [S]ome of the luxury buildings found in private psychiatric hospitals seem to be derived not from psychiatric principles but from an attempt to ape general hospitals and hotels—both highly sociofugal buildings."
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"By sociofugality I mean a design which prevents or discourages the formation of stable human relationships. […] Sociofugal buildings do not encourage interpersonal relationships and when group relationships occur they are of the shoulder-to-shoulder type found in a crowd or, when modified by discipline, in the regimented group. […] [S]ome of the luxury buildings found in private psychiatric hospitals seem to be derived not from psychiatric principles but from an attempt to ape general hospitals and hotels—both highly sociofugal buildings."
Etymology
From socio- (prefix meaning ‘society’) + -fugal (suffix meaning ‘travelling out from’), coined by the English psychiatrist Humphry Osmond (1917–2004) in 1957: see the quotation.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.