• Isolation

    Pronunciation

    • Rhymes: -eɪʃən

    Origin

    1800 From French isolation.

    Full definition of isolation

    Noun

    isolation

    (countable and uncountable; plural isolations)
    1. (chiefly uncountable) The state of being isolated, detached, or separated.
    2. The act of isolating.
    3. (diplomacy, of a country) The state of not having diplomatic relations with other countries (either with most or all other countries, or with specified other countries).
      • 1975, W. Raymond Duncan, “Problems of Cuban Foreign Policy”, chapter 20 of Irving Louis Horowitz (editor), Cuban Communism, Fifth Edition, Transaction (publisher, 1985), page 486:As of 1975, diplomatic ostracism is still imposed by the Organization of American States (OAS). The inter-American community also exercises a trade embargo against Cuba. But even within this context of hemispheric isolation, Havana’s diplomacy is strikingly contradictory.
      • 1993 September, Jon Brook Wolfsthal, “The Israeli initiative”, in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Volume 49, Number 7, page 8:Israel could offer to ease North Korea’s isolation with diplomatic recognition, ... ¶ ... But Washington’s strategy of increasing North Korean isolation left no room for back-channel talks with Tel Aviv, ...
      • 2009, Dore Gold, The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West, Regnery Publishing, ISBN 9781596985711, page 49:It Europe now pressed Washington to begin direct talks with Tehran, but Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, Rice’s point man on Iran, still stressed that diplomatic isolation of Iran—and not diplomatic engagement—was the only acceptable approach for dealing with the Iranian nuclear challenge.
    4. (chemistry: separation of a component from a mixture)(chemistry) The obtaining of an element from one of its compounds, or of a compound from a mixture
    5. (medicine) The separation of a patient, suffering from a contagious disease, from contact with others
    6. (computing) a database property that determines when and how changes made in one transaction are visible to other concurrent transactions
    © Wiktionary