The Oxford Dictionary of English defines outrage as:

• an extremely strong reaction of anger, shock, or indignation; or
• an action or event causing outrage

The sense is easy for us to understand. Our anger, our rage, comes out in our reaction. It’s right there in the word.

But the reason it’s right there in the word is that we expected it to be there, not because it was originally there.

In the play Hamlet the suicidal lead character’s famous line talks about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Hamlet is not talking about fortune taking out its rage on him. For Hamlet the slings and arrows just weren’t being fair. The troubles he was having to suffer were just right over the top.

The female impersonator Craig Russell didn’t call his movie Outrageous! because he was angry and had to let it out. It was his behavior as a female impersonator that was outrageous; it was way out there.

Both of these senses are closer to the etymological root of the word outrage.

The word appears in English 700 years ago which was about the time so many of those French words were finding their way onto English pages now that the French aristocracy had fully settled in to run England. So it’s no surprise that outrage comes from Old French.

But there is another word you may or may not know that comes from the same source: outré. Outré is more recently from French and it shows.

What it means is “out there” or “beyond.” So saying that someone you met had mannerisms that were outré is a fancy way of saying that they acted pretty outrageously or live an outrageous lifestyle.

The Old French word that became both outré and outrage had earlier been a Latin word ultra.

You know that something that is ultra-cool is “beyond cool” and it’s this meaning of “beyond” that first came with outrage into English; not a meaning of rage or outburst.

The rage part of outrage wasn’t anger at all, ultrage was something “of ultra.”

We associate outrage with anger just because it sounds like it should relate. It was behavior that was beyond acceptable that made people angry and naturally once they were angry it seemed logical that the word outrage referred to rage.

The American Heritage Dictionary points the Latin root back to an Indo-European al also meaning “beyond.”

The first citation that we have for outrage meaning “anger” is not quite half as old as the word is in English, it’s from 1572. Shakespeare would have been eight years old at the time.

Even today the older meaning hasn’t completely gone away. As those definitions I started out with indicated we get outraged by an act that is an outrage. Although it’s the second definition, the act came first etymologically