Word.ws English Dictionary

familiar stranger

familiar stranger noun: a stranger who is nonetheless recognized by another from regularly sharing a common physical space such as a street or bus stop, but with whom one does not interact.

Noun

familiar stranger (plural familiar strangers)

  1. (social psychology) A stranger who is nonetheless recognized by another from regularly sharing a common physical space such as a street or bus stop, but with whom one does not interact.
    • The familiar stranger is someone we meet every morning at the bus stop or at the campus, but we have never talked with.2018, Davide Spallazzo, Ilaria Mariani, Location-Based Mobile Games: Design Perspectives, Springer, →ISBN, page 39

Forms of familiar stranger

pluralfamiliar strangers

Origin of familiar stranger

Coined by American social psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1972.

Questions about familiar stranger

What does familiar stranger mean?
Familiar stranger means a stranger who is nonetheless recognized by another from regularly sharing a common physical space such as a street or bus stop, but with whom one does not interact.
What part of speech is familiar stranger?
Familiar stranger is a noun.
What is the plural of familiar stranger?
The plural of familiar stranger is familiar strangers.

Words near familiar stranger in the dictionary

  1. familializing
  2. familially
  3. familiar
  4. familiar fraud
  5. familiar frauds
  6. familiar stranger
  7. familiar strangers
  8. familiarisation
  9. familiarisations
  10. familiarise
  11. familiarised

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: familiar stranger (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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