Ghetto

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -É›təʊ

Origin

Borrowing from it ghetto, from Venetian, ghèto ("foundry"). Alternatively an apocope of the Italian borghetto, diminutive of borgo ("village"). Initially used of the areas Jews were concentrated, later extended to concentrations of other ethnicities and then non-ethic groups. The adjective and verb derive from the noun.

Full definition of ghetto

Noun

1. 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.
• 2009, Barbara Engelking-Boni, Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw ghetto: a guide to the perished city (ISBN 0300112343), page 25: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.
• 2010, Mike Lindner, Leaving Terror Behind: A Boy's Journey to Painting Over the Past (ISBN 1615664149), page 49:... concentrating the Jewish community into ghettoes. The Germans not only started the ghettoes, but they had also opened a concentration camp ...
2. An (often impoverished) area of a city inhabited predominantly by members of a specific nationality, ethnicity, or race.
• 1998, Steven J. L. Taylor, Desegregation in Boston and Buffalo: The Influence of Local Leaders (ISBN 0791439194), page 15:Charlestown would also become one of Boston's three large Irish ghettoes.
• 1998, Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (ISBN 0226342441), page 253:By 1960 the growth and development of Chicago's black areas of residence confirmed the existence of the city's second ghetto.
3. An area in which people who are distinguished by sharing something other than ethnicity concentrate or are concentrated.
• 2006, Gay tourism: culture and context (Gordon Waitt, Kevin Markwell, ISBN 0789016036), page 201: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.
• 2007, Romania & Moldova (Robert Reid, Leif Pettersen, ISBN 1741044782), page 190:The student ghetto, southwest of the centre, is inside the triangle formed by streets and is full of open-air bars, internet cafés, fast-food shops — and students.
• 2001, Justin Taylor, ''The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel (ISBN 0061881821), page 64: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, ...

Derived terms

• ghetto blaster, ghettoblaster
• ghettoise, ghettoize

Adjective

1. Of or relating to a ghetto or to ghettos in general.
2. (slang, informal) 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!
• Army Life: The First Four Months in My First Duty Station
• Ghettonation: A Journey Into the Land of Bling and Home of the Shameless
3. (US, informal) Characteristic of the style, speech, or behavior of residents of a predominantly black or other ghetto in the United States.
4. Having been raised in a ghetto in the United States.

Derived terms

• nonghetto

Verb

1. To confine (a specified group of people) to a ghetto.
• 1964, James A. Atkins, The age of Jim Crow, page 274:This is, in brief, a part of the story of the ghettoing of a large segment of Denver's Negro population.
• 2001, Paul Johnson, Modern Times Revised Edition: World from the Twenties to the Nineties (ISBN 0060935502), page 526:All African states practised racist policies. In the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia expelled more than a quarter of a million Jews and ghettoed the few thousand who remained. In the 1960s the United Republic of Tanzania expelled its Arabs or deprived them of equal rights.