Ghetto

Quick meaning: Ghetto is a noun meaning An (often impoverished) area of a city inhabited predominantly by members of a specific nationality, ethnicity, or race.

Meaning

An (often impoverished) area of a city inhabited predominantly by members of a specific nationality, ethnicity, or race.

More Meanings

1. An area in which people who are distinguished by sharing something other than ethnicity concentrate or are concentrated.
2. Of or relating to a ghetto or to ghettos in general.
3. Having been raised in a ghetto in the United States.
4. An (often walled) area of a city in which Jews are concentrated by force and law. (Used particularly of areas in medieval Italy and in Nazi-controlled Europe.)
5. (figurative, sometimes derogatory) An isolated, self-contained, segregated subsection, area or field of interest; often of minority or specialist interest.
6. (US, informal, often derogatory or offensive) Characteristic of the style, speech, or behavior of residents of a predominantly black or other ghetto in the United States.
7. (slang, informal) Unseemly and indecorous or of low quality; cheap; shabby, crude.

Example Sentences

Charlestown would also become one of Boston's three large Irish ghettoes.

Established by the Germans in October 1940, the Warsaw Ghetto was the largest Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Europe.

By 1960 the growth and development of Chicago's black areas of residence confirmed the existence of the city's second ghetto.

[…] concentrating the Jewish community into ghettoes. The Germans not only started the ghettoes, but they had also opened a concentration camp […]

Word Forms

• ghettos
• ghettoes
• ghetti
• ghettoing
• ghettoed

Synonyms for ghetto

Depending on context, synonyms include barrio, estate, favela, jects, projects, scheme.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include slum, favela, hood, pauper, zone, inner-city.

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