What does emigrant mean?
An emigrant is a person who leaves their own country to establish permanent residence in another. The word frames the act of migration from the standpoint of the country of departure: someone who emigrates from Ireland becomes an immigrant in Canada, and the same individual may be described by both terms depending on where the observer stands. English also uses the adjective form, as in 'emigrant communities' or 'emigrant ships.' Historically rich and neutral in tone, the word appears frequently in discussions of the great population movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when millions of Europeans crossed the Atlantic. It carries no inherent judgment — unlike some near-synonyms, it neither romanticizes nor stigmatizes departure. Related terms include emigrate, the verb describing the act of leaving, and emigration, the noun for the phenomenon itself. For anyone writing about family history, demography, or colonial-era travel, emigrant offers a precise way to describe those who left.
nounA person who leaves their own country in order to settle permanently in another.
- A person who leaves their native country to settle permanently elsewhere.
"Her grandparents were emigrants from Sicily who arrived at Ellis Island in 1913."
"Thousands of emigrants crowded the docks of Liverpool hoping for passage to Australia."
"As a young emigrant, he sent most of his wages home to his family in Naples."
Regular plural; used for groups of people leaving a country, often in historical or statistical contexts.
"Millions of emigrants passed through the port before the First World War."
The same nineteenth-century passenger was an emigrant the moment she boarded the ship in Dublin — and an immigrant the moment she stepped ashore in New York; only her location on the ocean decided which word history wrote down first.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of emigrant
The English word emigrant comes from Latin emigrare, meaning 'to move away' or 'to depart from one's place,' formed from the prefix e- ('out of') combined with migrare ('to move, migrate'). It entered English via French émigrant in the late eighteenth century, coinciding with the era of large-scale European emigration. It shares its root with migrate, migrant, immigrant, and transmigrate, all descendants of the Latin migrare.
Related word forms
How emigrant is actually used
Emigrant describes the moving person from the perspective of the country being left; it is a neutral, largely formal or historical term. In everyday modern usage about contemporary movement, words like immigrant or migrant are far more common, and emigrant tends to appear in historical, demographic, or official contexts.
Easily confused with emigrant
An emigrant is someone leaving a country, while an immigrant is someone arriving to settle in a new one — the same person may be both, depending on the point of view.
A migrant moves from place to place generally (often seasonally or without permanent settlement), whereas an emigrant specifically leaves their home country with the intent of settling elsewhere.