chawl means A type of residential tenement building found in India, typically for poor working-class people. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 90 out of 100.
Why this word is great
CHAWL — [Noun] A multi-story tenement building in western India, providing low-cost, communal housing for the urban working class. The word is borrowed from Marathi चाळ (cāḷ), which is from Sanskrit, its antiquity grounding this modern necessity. Unlike a "tenement," a generic abstraction of urban crowding, or an "apartment," a privatized cell of modern life, a chawl is a specific architecture of compressed collectivity. It is the percussive rhythm of a hundred footsteps on a single concrete staircase, the geometry of laundry strung like celebratory bunting across a courtyard, and the nightly migration of families to claim a square of floor behind thin cotton curtains—a vertical village where every private sorrow has a public echo, a monument to the intricate society forged within the strict economies of space.
noun
- A type of residential tenement building found in India, typically for poor working-class people.“I came from a chawl, and when I started out main zyada baat nahi karta tha, mera haath zyada chalta tha (both laugh!”
- Jaw or cheek.
- Jowl; cheek; face.