Isolato

Word of the Day for Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Isolato \ahy-suh-LEY-toh\, noun:

a person who is spiritually isolated from or out of sympathy with his or her times or society.

Also, in the years since the events you are investigating, my life has been that of an isolato, a shepherd on a mountaintop, situated as far from so-called civilization as possible, and it has made me unnaturally brusque and awkward.
-- Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter, 1998

There is, of course, Paul's unremitting aloneness: he is in every sense an isolato, and if this state is elicited by his impertinence and his refusal to conform, it is brought about as well by the inability of all those around him to perceive either his uniqueness or his pain.
-- Philip Stevick, The American Short Story, 1984

The most predictable Justices now on the Court, Antonin Scalia and Thomas, seem brooding isolatoes, openly contemptuous of the doctrinal laxness of their brethren.
-- Louis Menand, "Decisions, Decisions," The New Yorker, July 11, 2005

Isolato was popularised by Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick. The word comes through Italian from the Latin word insulātus meaning "made into an island."

Thanks to: www.dictionary.com