Otherness is the quality of being strange and different — of not being “one of us.” It is not a thing you can hold. It is how a person, a group, or even a place can feel foreign, set apart, or hard to fit into the usual picture. Writers and thinkers use it when they talk about how a society treats people it marks as different: by race, language, religion, or custom. A traveller can feel their own otherness in a new country; a film can play on the otherness of a stranger in a small town. Though actually, it is a rather bookish word. Ordinary English is more likely to say “she felt so different” or “he didn’t belong.” Otherness turns up in essays, art writing, and university talk. It does not mean “other people” as a group, and it does not mean “other things.” It names the feeling or the fact of difference itself.