Designed to keep people out or prevent them from participating in something; intentionally excluding certain groups.
From Latin 'excludere' (to shut out) + '-ary' (relating to). The suffix '-ary' was added in the 1800s to create an adjective form describing the quality of excluding.
This word became especially common in legal and political contexts during civil rights movements—'exclusionary practices' and 'exclusionary rule' are terms that describe how systems can unfairly keep people out, revealing how language evolves to name injustices we finally notice.
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