xenophile

The ancient Greeks had a word, xenos (ξένος), that carried two meanings at once. A xenos was a stranger who arrived at your threshold and a guest whom you were obligated to feed and shelter before questioning. Homer used xenos throughout the Odyssey to describe every traveler who knocked on a door. The tension inside that single word, and the moral system it encoded, was called xenia: the sacred duty of hospitality toward the foreign.

The companion root, philos (φίλος), meant loving and dear in classical Greek. Aristotle developed the philosophy of philia in the Nicomachean Ethics around 350 BCE, distinguishing bonds of utility, pleasure, and virtue. The suffix -phile entered European learned vocabulary through Latin borrowings during the Renaissance. By the 1800s, English naturalists and explorers had made it a productive suffix for naming devotion to a particular subject.

Xenophile appears in English print in the 1890s, coined by travel writers and early anthropologists who needed a word for people unusually drawn to foreign customs and peoples. Its opposite, xenophobe, arrived a decade earlier, coined in French political writing of the 1880s. The pairing made explicit what had previously been left to inference: that a person's orientation toward the foreign was a trait worth naming. The two words grew up together, each defined by the shadow of the other.

The twentieth century gave xenophile more work to do. Writers like Paul Bowles, who settled in Tangier in 1947, and Bruce Chatwin, who spent years in Patagonia and Australia, embodied the temperament before the word had settled into common use. By the 1980s, it appeared in standard English dictionaries without qualification. It now covers everyone from the collector of Japanese ceramics to the linguist who learns Welsh for pleasure.