# caste

Pronunciation: US say "KAST" /kæst/; UK say "KAHST" /kɑːst/

## Noun

1. One of the hereditary social classes or subclasses into which South Asian society is divided, with similar systems found historically in other cultures.
   - Simple: A social group that people are born into and usually cannot leave, common in South Asia.
   - _Her family had belonged to the same caste for generations._
   - _Reformers campaigned to dismantle the privileges that higher castes enjoyed._
2. A separate and fixed class of people who mainly keep company with one another and rarely mix outside the group.
   - Simple: A fixed group of people in society who mostly stay among themselves.
   - _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._
3. The organization of a society into castes, the hereditary classes people are born into, considered as a single system.
   - Simple: The way a society is split into fixed groups that people are born into.
   - _Caste determined who could own land, enter temples, or marry whom._
   - _Activists argued that caste, not poverty alone, kept communities apart._
4. Within an insect colony, a class of members sharing a particular body size and function, such as workers, soldiers, or reproductives.
   - Simple: A group of insects in a colony that all have the same size and job, like worker ants.
   - _The soldier caste defends the nest with oversized jaws._
   - _Different castes within a termite mound perform sharply different roles._

## 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.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/caste (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).