/ˈrɛkluːs/
[noun] A person who chooses to live alone and avoid contact with other people, usually because they prefer solitude or want to stay away from society.
A recluse was originally someone physically locked away by the Church — not a shy person, but a holy prisoner by choice.
The word 'recluse' begins its life in classical Latin with the verb 'claudere', meaning 'to shut' or 'to close'. From this root, Latin formed the compound verb 'recludere', built from the prefix 're-' (meaning 'back' or 'away') and 'claudere', giving the sense of shutting something away completely. The past participle of 'recludere' was 'reclusus', meaning 'shut off' or 'enclosed', and it is this form that passed through Old French as 'reclus' before arriving in Middle English as 'recluse' in the 13th century.
In its earliest English uses, the word had a very specific and deeply religious meaning that most people today would find surprising. A recluse was not simply someone who preferred staying home — it referred to an anchorite or anchoress, a religious hermit who was literally sealed inside a small cell attached to a church, often in a formal ceremony that resembled a funeral. The Church would brick up the door behind them. They were, in the most physical sense, shut away from the world. Food was passed through a tiny window, and they communicated with visitors through a small opening covered by a curtain.
This practice was taken very seriously in medieval Europe, and some recluses became enormously influential. Julian of Norwich, the 14th-century English mystic, lived as a recluse in a cell attached to St Julian's Church in Norwich. Despite — or perhaps because of — her total physical withdrawal from society, her writings, including 'Revelations of Divine Love', became some of the most widely read spiritual texts in English history. The recluse, paradoxically, could have tremendous public reach.
Over the following centuries, as the specific religious practice of enclosure declined, the meaning of 'recluse' gradually broadened. By the 17th and 18th centuries, it was being applied more loosely to anyone who withdrew from public life — a hermit in spirit if not in brick and mortar. The word shed its theological clothing and became a description of personality and lifestyle. A wealthy eccentric who refused visitors, a grieving widow who never left her house, a scholar buried in his library — all could now be called recluses.
The Latin root 'claudere' is remarkably productive in English, having given us a whole family of words through different routes. Latin 'claudere' → Old French 'clore' → English 'close'; Latin 'includere' (to shut in) → Old French 'inclure' → English 'include'; Latin 'excludere' (to shut out) → Old French 'exclure' → English 'exclude'; Latin 'claudere' also → English 'claustrophobia' via the related Latin noun 'claustrum' (an enclosed space). Each of these words carries, at its heart, the same ancient image of a door being firmly shut.
Today, 'recluse' carries a mixture of admiration and unease. We use it to describe famously private figures — the novelist J.D. Salinger, the poet Emily Dickinson, the billionaire Howard Hughes — and the word still carries echoes of that original medieval solemnity. Choosing to close the door on the world is, the word reminds us, an act with a long and serious history.