An expat is an expatriate: a person living in a country that is not their original home, usually for work, for a stretch of years. It is an informal shortening — fine in speech, emails, and magazines, a little too casual for a law or a school essay. In a city like Taipei you hear it for foreigners who have a job and a lease, not for someone here on a two-week holiday. A tourist is not an expat. Though actually, people are not even-handed with the word. Westerners with office jobs often get called expats; workers who came from Southeast Asia to do harder jobs are more often called migrants or foreign workers, even when both groups have lived here just as long. The word can also sound clubby, as if it names a scene — expat bars, the expat community — rather than simply 'a person who lives abroad'.