strange

The root strange begins with the Latin word extrāneus, which simply meant "external, on the outside, coming from without." It was built directly on extrā ("outside, beyond") — the same little word that gives us extra and external. To a Roman, an extrāneus was anything or anyone that didn't belong inside the household, the city, or the family: an outsider, a foreigner, something from beyond the wall.

As Latin softened into Old French, extrāneus was worn down into estrange, meaning "foreign, alien, from another land." Middle English borrowed it and trimmed the e- off the front, leaving us strange. So at first, strange didn't mean "weird" at all — it meant foreign. A strange land was literally a foreign country; a strange face was the face of someone from elsewhere.

Here is the key semantic move: what is foreign is also unfamiliar, and what is unfamiliar feels odd. The meaning slid one step at a time — from outside → foreign → unfamiliar → weird. That is why the modern word still carries both flavors at once: when you say "this place feels strange," you mean it's unfamiliar; when you say "a strange noise," you mean it's odd. Both senses are the same idea seen from two angles — something that doesn't belong inside your normal world.

The family branches in two directions:

- stranger keeps the older, more literal sense — one who is from outside = a person you don't know, an outsider. ("Never talk to strangers.")
- strangely / strangeness are the regular adverb and noun built on the "odd/unfamiliar" sense.
- The Old French e- survived in the verb branch. estrange = to make someone an outsider, to turn a close person into a stranger — that is, to drive them apart. Its past participle estranged describes a relationship that has gone cold (an estranged wife is a wife who has become like a stranger, living apart), and estrangement names that state of distance and broken closeness.

Notice the through-line: every member of this family is about the boundary between inside (familiar, close, ours) and outside (foreign, unfamiliar, alien). strange asks "is this from outside my normal world?"; stranger names a person from outside; estrange pushes someone from the inside to the outside.

The root is also a useful signpost to its relatives. Because strange comes from extrā "outside," it is a blood relative of extra- (extra, extraneous) and extern- (external, exterior) — all the "outside" words. And it sits near ali- ("other, another"), which gives alien and alienate — the Latin-flavored twins of strange and estrange (a stranger is much like an alien; to estrange someone is to alienate them).