Meaning of on the outside, looking in | Babel Free

Definitions

Excluded from a group, process, or opportunity, and feeling downhearted as a result.

idiomatic

Examples

“Won't you take me back again? I'll be waiting here till then / On the outside looking in”

“"In a sense, I've always felt on the outside, looking in," Mr. Douglas says. "It's my background, damn it. My father was an illiterate Russian immigrant, a ragman, the lowest rung on the economic scale. There were six sisters and my mother; I was the only boy. To be a young Jewish boy in a town—Amsterdam, in upstate New York—that was quite anti-Semitic."”

“A recurrent theme of Theroux's books is this sense of being an alien, on the outside looking in.”

“While China's economy soars, hundreds of millions of migrant workers and rural peasants have been left on the outside looking in.”

CEFR level