From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishleperlep‧er /ˈlepə $ -ər/ noun [countable] 1 MIsomeone who has leprosy2 AVOIDsomeone that people avoid because they have done something that people disapprove of They treated me as if I was a leper.
Examples from the Corpus
leper• I know of cases where the law has been violated by one jurisdiction shifting a leper into another.• She then gave the dairy product to a leper, whose affliction immediately disappeared.• In Hawaii lepers were first sent to Molokai as colonists, not as patients.• Armies that ran out of rocks for their catapults would sometimes lob live lepers into besieged towns to scare the inhabitants.• Suppose it were announced that there were more than a million lepers among our people.• They treated me like some kind of leper.• The Disciples would surely have tried to stop the leper coming close.• Despite evidence in the 40s that leprosy was rarely contagious and easily treated, lepers were banished to remote islands until 1996.• Athelstan caught a glimpse of the two lepers, shrouded in their hoods near the charnel house.Origin leper (1300-1400) leper “leprosy” ((13-16 centuries)), from Old French, from Late Latin lepra, from Greek, from lepein “to remove skin” 