1830 tr. L. A. F. De Bourrienne Private Mem. N. Bonaparte I. v. 61 His position placed too great a social distance between him and me.

1850 E. L. Cleaveland Disc. Existing State of Morals New Haven 15 Wide as is the social distance between these two extremes, the connection in their business relations is of the closest character.

1871 Times 2 Dec. 12/6 Those past days, when the social distance between master and menial, theoretically greater, was practically less than at present.

1924 R. E. Park in Jrnl. Appl. Sociol. 8 344 Prejudice is..a sort of spontaneous conservation which tends to preserve the social order and the social distances upon which that order rests.

1960 Jrnl. Abnormal & Social Psychol. 61 110/1 A subject indicated zero social distance by stating that he was willing to marry a member of a particular ethnic group.

1978 P. Bailey Leisure & Class in Victorian Eng. iv. 105 The middle classes were acutely concerned to reinforce, not reduce, social distance.

2003 G. Yancey Who is White? iii. 65 Higher levels of social distance mean that people will attempt to distance themselves from members of another race.

1935 Times 4 Nov. 10/3 Miss Tempest..significantly watches her husband's embarrassed attempts to maintain a safe social distance between himself and his possessive admirer.

1955 G. Sircom tr. H. Hediger Psychol. & Behaviour Captive Animals vi. 83 According to its species, each individual keeps at a greater or lesser distance from its group; that is, the group shows specific social distance.

1966 E. T. Hall Hidden Dimension x. 115 Desks in the offices of important people are large enough to hold visitors at the far phase of social distance.

1985 C. Turk Effective Speaking x. 170 Quite a bit of jockeying goes on in the establishment of a comfortable social distance in interactions. This comfortable social distance varies between cultures.

2006 G. Hannell Identifying Children with Special Needs iii. 34 Other children may intuitively understand appropriate social distance, how to make friends, or how to respond to a visitor.

2004 Emerging Infectious Dis. 10 1900/1 The independent effectiveness of measures to ‘increase social distance’ and wearing masks in public places requires further evaluation.

2014 Agence France Presse (Nexis) 8 Aug. Hygiene and social distance can break the chain of infection and stop it.

2020 @CDCgov 10 June in twitter.com (accessed 17 Dec. 2020) Do you know a new or expectant parent? Reach out and offer support during #COVID19 while maintaining social distance.

1933 E. S. Bogardus in Sociol. & Social Res. 17 265 In making the social distance scale in its present form the writer prepared a list of 60 single sentence descriptions, nearly all of which were heard in ordinary conversations where a person was expressing himself about other persons... One hundred persons were invited to rate each of the 60 statements according to the amount of social distance which it is judged that the statements represent.

1980 W. H. Watson Stress & Old Age vii. 85 A high distaste of the former [social group] for close relations with the latter (as measured by the Bogardus social distance scale).

2000 T. Heatherton Social Psychol. of Stigma vii. 75 The participants filled out a social distance scale, indicating the degree of stigmatization of the diseased person.

2009 @maytinee 7 July in twitter.com (accessed 9 Dec. 2020) UCF official on kids sick with swine flu: ‘We're asking them to social distance themselves.’

2013 Jrnl. Health Econ. 32 440 Public policies intended to induce behavioral change, specifically incentives to reduce interpersonal contacts or to ‘social distance’, increasingly play a prominent role in public disease response strategies.

2020 South Wales Echo (Nexis) 13 June 6 We have had no Covid-19 cases but have been social distancing really carefully.

2020 N.Z. Herald (Nexis) 17 Sept. We thought we were safe so long as we social distanced.