ghetto
noun/ˈɡetəʊ/
/ˈɡetəʊ/
(plural ghettos, ghettoes)
- (often disapproving) a poor area of a city where a particular group of people live isolated from the rest of the population, for example people of the same ethnic group or background
- a poor kid who grew up in the ghetto
- I'm from the ghetto and I didn't have it easy.
Wordfinder
- an area or group with particular characteristics, in which people are in some way separate from the rest of the population
- He tended to stick to the relative safety of San Francisco’s gay ghetto.
- The south coast of Spain has become something of a tourist ghetto.
- They felt their beliefs made them outsiders, and had developed a ghetto mentality.
- the area of a town where Jewish people were forced to live in the past
- the Warsaw ghetto
Word Originearly 17th cent.: perhaps from Italian getto ‘foundry’ (because the first ghetto was established in 1516 on the site of a foundry in Venice), or from Italian borghetto, diminutive of borgo ‘borough’.
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