ghetto means of or relating to a ghetto or to ghettos in general.
ghetto is pronounced /ˈɡɛ.təʊ/.
Why “ghetto” is a great word
An area where a particular ethnic or racial group is concentrated due to systemic social, legal, or economic pressures. From the name of the Venetian Ghetto, an area of Venice where Jews were legally restricted to live in 1516; the ultimate origin of the Italian word 'ghetto' is uncertain, but it is possibly from Venetian 'getto' ("foundry"), as the site was near a foundry. First attested in English in the 1610s. Unlike an “enclave,” which suggests a voluntary, cohesive community, or a “slum,” which describes physical squalor, “ghetto” denotes a condition of imposed segregation, its boundaries drawn by external force. It is the iron gates closing at dusk in sixteenth-century Venice, the redlined neighborhoods of twentieth-century Chicago, the particular sound of a word reclaimed and weaponized in equal measure—the original site has become every site where a group is pressed together and pressed down, where poverty becomes not merely economic but existential.
Etymology
Borrowed from the name of the Venetian Ghetto, whose etymology and original source language is uncertain. Compare Italian ghetto.
adj
- 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.”
- 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!”
- 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.”
- Having been raised in a ghetto in the United States.
noun
- 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.)“The Venetian ghetto, according to Sennett, was to provide protection from the unclean bodies of the Jews and their sullying touch. The Roman ghetto, on the other hand, was planned as an area for mission. It was supposed to collect the Jews in one place, so that it would be easier to convert them.”
- 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.”
- 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.”
- 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.”
verb
- 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.”
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.
- shtetl 81% match — A Jewish village or small town, especially one in Eastern Europe. vs ghetto →
- hypersegregation 81% match — A form of racial segregation that consists of the geographical grouping of racial groups. vs ghetto →
- diaspora 81% match — The dispersion of a group in a manner comparable to that of the Jews among the Gentiles after the Babylonian captivity (6th century BCE). vs ghetto →
- pogrom 80% match — A riot aimed at persecution or massacre of a particular ethnic or religious group, usually Jews. vs ghetto →
- banlieue 80% match — The outskirts of a city, especially in France, inhabited chiefly by poor people living in tenement-style housing. vs ghetto →
- ethnoburb 80% match — A suburban residential and business area with a notable cluster of a particular ethnic minority population. vs ghetto →
- tenement 80% match — A building that is rented to multiple tenants, especially a low-rent, run-down one. vs ghetto →
- judeophobia 79% match — A fear or hatred of Jews. vs ghetto →