Ostracize is not, as urbandictionary.com says “An exercise program for ostriches.”

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Ostracize is in fact a word that ultimately traces back to the animal kingdom.

Urbandictionary also contains the definition “to shun one away from the rest of a group” which does line up with Merriam Webster which says “to banish from society, to cast out, to exile.”

According to both The Oxford English Dictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary, in ancient Greek the bivalve shells you might find at the beach were called ostrakon.

This is the root also for our name for those sexy slithery salty treats: oysters.

Even though an ostrich lays eggs and those eggs have a shell, the ostriches name is unrelated.

The ancient Greeks are rightly admired for their beautiful pottery. You gotta think though that over a couple of thousand years, if there are still a pile of vases each in one piece, there must have been many more that were dropped and got broken over the years.  Think of it, with all that fighting between Troy and Athens there must have been crockery shards all over the place.

You think I’m joking.

In actual fact there were enough chunks of pottery lying around the streets during the reign of Kleisthenes around 508 BC, that when he looked for a way to keep the powerful men in his city-state from killing each other, he used these broken pots to do it.  Rather than lynch someone, the law was that men of stature would vote, by marking their opinions on these shell-like shards as to whether to send they guy they thought was a jerk, away for ten years.

The law prevented folks ganging up for gain, since after ten years the ousted person could return to their full property.

You can see that our word ostracize comes from this “sending away for a decade” which in turn takes its name from the shell-like fragments.