caste
Pluralcastes
- 1One of the hereditary social classes or subclasses into which South Asian society is divided, with similar systems found historically in other cultures.
Her family had belonged to the same caste for generations.
Reformers campaigned to dismantle the privileges that higher castes enjoyed.
Similarclass
Note
The word reached English from Portuguese or Spanish casta, "lineage, breed, race." The OED traces casta further back to Portuguese casto, "chaste," from Latin castus. The weight falls on birth: one is born into a caste rather than joining it. In writing about social divisions it often appears in a list beside creed, religion and sect, as one more line that separates people.
- 2A separate and fixed class of people who mainly keep company with one another and rarely mix outside the group.
The officer corps behaved like a privileged caste, marrying within its own ranks.
Old money and new money rarely mixed, each acting as a closed caste.
Similarclique, class, elite, set
Note
Here the word travels beyond South Asia to any closed social circle. Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) has a character pledge loyalty "to one's friends and one's family and one's caste." Kipling, in 1889, writes of keeping one's caste, meaning one's standing within a set. Unlike the South Asian classes, it need not be inherited, though Macaulay could still call the tinkers a hereditary caste.
- 3The organization of a society into castes, the hereditary classes people are born into, considered as a single system.
Caste determined who could own land, enter temples, or marry whom.
Activists argued that caste, not poverty alone, kept communities apart.
Note
Without an article, the word names the whole arrangement rather than any one group within it. Compare "caste decided who could marry whom" with "a lower caste," which is the single hereditary class. Norman Lindsay's Redheap (1930) speaks of "the peculiar nature of caste in country towns," which shows the uncountable use applied well outside its South Asian setting.
- 4Within an insect colony, a class of members sharing a particular body size and function, such as workers, soldiers, or reproductives.
The soldier caste defends the nest with oversized jaws.
Different castes within a termite mound perform sharply different roles.
Note
Zoology borrows the social word and pictures the colony as a society of fixed, specialized classes. It applies to eusocial insects such as bees and termites, whose members differ in body form as well as in job. That is the force of "polymorphous." Castes are usually named by their role, as in the worker caste, the soldier caste, or the reproductives.
Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from Portuguese or Spanish casta ("lineage, breed, race"). The OED traces this to Portuguese casto ("chaste"), from Latin castus, while Coromines (1987) instead suggests a hypothetical Gothic form meaning "group, collection of animals," cognate with English cast.