refugee
Pluralrefugees
Verbrefugees, refugeeing, refugeed
Pluralrefugees
Formsrefugees, refugeeing, refugeed
- 1A person seeking shelter or protection, especially in a foreign country, because of war, persecution, or natural disaster.
The refugee applied for asylum after escaping political persecution in her homeland.
Aid groups built camps to shelter refugees displaced by the earthquake.
Similarasylum-seeker, evacuee, exile
Note
A word born of one exodus: French réfugié, first used of the Huguenots who fled religious persecution after the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685. It now stretches to anyone displaced, even within a country, as when evacuees from the New Orleans convention center were called refugees. It also works before a noun (refugee resettlement agencies) and figuratively, for voters who abandon a party.
- 2A person fleeing from justice or a deserved punishment; a runaway or fugitive.
Hunted by the authorities, the embezzler became a refugee from justice.
The crowd jeered at the captured robbers as cowardly refugees from the gallows.
Note
Here the word is turned against the person it names. They are running from a punishment they are thought to deserve, not from persecution, and the label is derogatory. Because the ordinary sense carries sympathy, use this one only where the scorn is intended. It usually takes from, followed by whatever is being escaped: a refugee from justice, from the gallows.
- 3To convey enslaved people away from the advance of federal forces.
As Union troops neared, the owners refugeed their slaves further south.
Some planters chose to refugee their enslaved people rather than risk losing them.
Note
A verb of the American Civil War, made straight from the noun. Slaveholders refugeed the people they enslaved, moving them deeper into Confederate territory beyond the reach of Union armies. The grammar inverts the noun: the enslaved people being moved are the object, and the subject is the person moving them. Its forms keep the double e throughout: refugees, refugeeing, refugeed.
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Origin
From French réfugié, the past participle of réfugier ("to take refuge"), from Old French refuge ("hiding place") and Latin refugium ("a place of refuge"). It originally described French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685; the sense "one seeking asylum" broadened around 1914 to mean more generally "one fleeing home," first applied to civilians fleeing the fighting in Flanders during World War I.