ghetto

Etymology

Definitions

1. 1

   An (often walled) area of a city in which Jews are concentrated by force and law. (Used…

   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.)

   • […] concentrating the Jewish community into ghettoes. The Germans not only started the ghettoes, but they had also opened a concentration camp […]
   • Established by the Germans in October 1940, the Warsaw Ghetto was the largest Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Europe.
2. 2

   An (often impoverished) area of a city inhabited predominantly by members of a specific…

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

   • Charlestown would also become one of Boston's three large Irish ghettoes.
   • By 1960 the growth and development of Chicago's black areas of residence confirmed the existence of the city's second ghetto.
3. 3

   An area in which people who are distinguished by sharing something other than ethnicity…

   An area in which people who are distinguished by sharing something other than ethnicity concentrate or are concentrated.

   • Counterhegemonic spaces imagined as bounded territories ensure that heteronormativity is fixed beyond the borders of the gay ghetto. The rural and suburban lives of lesbian and gay people are made invisible and signified as inauthentic.
   • The student ghetto, southwest of the centre, is inside the triangle formed by [three streets] and is full of open-air bars, internet cafés, fast-food shops — and students.
   • They're back in the student ghetto now, on oak-shaded streets lined with run-down houses filled with nonnuclear families of all varieties and kinds. Safe now from the tractor beams of the horrible good Christians, […]
4. ›+ 6 more definitionsshow fewer

   1. 4

      An isolated, self-contained, segregated subsection, area or field of interest

      An isolated, self-contained, segregated subsection, area or field of interest; often of minority or specialist interest.

      • Abraham Merritt wrote for the pulps and never in his lifetime achieved critical success. Yet he had a devoted following in the science fiction ghetto who admired the clarity of his style and his power to evoke moods.
      • Invent is undoubtedly the wrong word, but the push from government was crucial in getting the Internet out of its academic ghetto.
   2. 5

      Of or relating to a ghetto or to ghettos in general.

      • Those residing in ghetto communities were particularly ill equipped to adapt to the seismic changes taking place in the U.S. economy; they were left isolated and jobless.
   3. 6

      Unseemly and indecorous or of low quality

      Unseemly and indecorous or of low quality; cheap; shabby, crude.

      • My apartment's so ghetto, the rats and cockroaches filed a complaint with the city!
      • I like to drive ghetto cars; if they break down you can just abandon them and pick up a new one!
      • I had not used very many minutes on my phone. Here we pay for our minutes prior to using them, and it gets expensive. I did not want her using up all my minutes. That was very ghetto and disrespectful.
   4. 7

      Characteristic of the style, speech, or behavior of residents of a predominantly black or…

      Characteristic of the style, speech, or behavior of residents of a predominantly black or other ghetto in the United States.

      • The music I liked was very ghetto and gritty. It was the stuff that didn't really cross over much, but spoke to a roots black experience. People don't understand this now, but the falsetto, crying singers were the most ghetto back then.
      • You're the one that grew up in the suburbs and you act way more ghetto than I do.” “I am not ghetto.” Val said in an English accent and broke out laughing.
      • I beat up my kid's principal. Can you get any more ghetto than that?
   5. 8

      Having been raised in a ghetto in the United States.

   6. 9

      To confine (a specified group of people) to a ghetto.

      • This is, in brief, a part of the story of the ghettoing of a large segment of Denver's Negro population.

The neighborhood