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banish

Verb
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

To send away or drive out, often as a punishment. In older or literary use, it can sound stronger than modern everyday

Detailed Definition
Banish means to force someone to leave a place or group, often by authority or social pressure. Dickinson uses it playfully here to suggest that being “nobody” is a secret society that must be hidden from the public. The word gives the line a mock-serious, almost dramatic tone.
Example
Example in poetry:
“They’d banish us, you know” gives banish a colloquial force of expulsion from a community; Ovid’s Tristia records the grief of exile after banishment from Rome; Dante’s Commedia is shaped by the poet’s own political exile from Florence; contemporary poems about deportation, displacement, or ostracism often recast banishment as a continuing social reality
Additional Notes
The verb appears in a literary, slightly old-fashioned sense in the quoted line, where it means more than just “send away.”; Found in the poem, I'm Nobody! by Emily Dickinson
Also Known As
expel exile oust dismiss
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