CASTAWAY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does castaway mean? 

• CASTAWAY (noun)
  The noun CASTAWAY has 2 senses:

1. a person who is rejected (from society or home)

2. a shipwrecked person

  Familiarity information: CASTAWAY used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• CASTAWAY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A person who is rejected (from society or home)

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

castaway; Ishmael; outcast; pariah

Hypernyms ("castaway" is a kind of...):

unfortunate; unfortunate person (a person who suffers misfortune)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "castaway"):

heretic; misbeliever; religious outcast (a person who holds religious beliefs in conflict with the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church)

leper (a pariah who is avoided by others)

Harijan; untouchable (belongs to lowest social and ritual class in India)

Sense 2

Meaning:

A shipwrecked person

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

castaway; shipwreck survivor

Hypernyms ("castaway" is a kind of...):

abandoned person (someone for whom hope has been abandoned)

 Context examples 

It remains for me, then, he said, to remember you in my prayers, and to entreat God for you, in all earnestness, that you may not indeed become a castaway.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

“Then we’ll drop him over without any palavering, unless our clerical-looking castaway has the burial service at sea by heart.”

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

My dear children, pursued the black marble clergyman, with pathos, this is a sad, a melancholy occasion; for it becomes my duty to warn you, that this girl, who might be one of God's own lambs, is a little castaway: not a member of the true flock, but evidently an interloper and an alien.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)