‘Exotic’ (from the Greek exō meaning ‘outside’, via the Latin exoticus), recorded in both English and French from the late sixteenth century, initially designated something originating in or characteristic of a foreign country. The patterns of the term's usage in European languages have restricted its application to specific geographical areas such as the mythical ‘Orient’ or the tropics conjured up by the German exotisch. This objective meaning links the exotic to domesticated, geographically determined forms of otherness. As early as the seventeenth century, a subjective meaning, ‘unfamiliar’, or ‘unordinary’, became entwined with it (Moura 1998, 23–24), often positively connoted as ‘appealing’ or ‘alluring’. Semantically, the exotic therefore oscillates between the hackneyed foreignness of a far-flung cliché, understood in Eurocentric terms, and radical otherness.

The relational prefix ‘exo’, implying the existence of a spatially outer ‘elsewhere’ and a culturally heterogeneous ‘other’, has ensured this keyword's enduring relevance to travel writing. The appeal of the unfamiliar that the exotic harbours has traditionally served as a prompt to travel, while the encounter with it has sparked the desire or impulse to create a textual representation of the journey (see motivation). This formulation may sound outdated in a globalized world where ‘[t] he “exotic” is uncannily close […] Difference is encountered in the adjoining neighbourhood, the familiar turns up at the ends of the earth’ (Clifford 1988, 13–14). The semantic elasticity of the subjectively exotic turns it, however, into an apt tool for probing the location of ‘elsewhere’ and of cultural diversity, an endeavour central to many contemporary forms of travel writing.

In recent scholarship, the exotic has mainly been scrutinized through Western travellers’ responses to cultural diversity and the perceived loss thereof. The ‘rhetorically blatant’ shock (Campbell 1988, 3) of Medieval and Early Modern travel writers enshrined the ideal of exotic as an encounter with and description of the radically different (see wonder): the accounts of Marco Polo's thirteenth-century journey to China, or of Bougainville and Cook's encounter with Polynesia provide some notable examples. Haunted by this ideal of pristine encounters with the exotic, travel writers have, since the nineteenth century, lamented the ‘entropic decline’ of cultural diversity brought about by colonial expansion, increased mobility and (post)colonial globalization (see colonialism).