ghetto

Etymology

Borrowed from the name of the Venetian Ghetto, whose etymology and original source language is uncertain. Compare Italian 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.)
   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. 2009, Barbara Engelking-Boni, Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw ghetto: a guide to the perished city, page 25
   […] concentrating the Jewish community into ghettoes. The Germans not only started the ghettoes, but they had also opened a concentration camp […] 2010, Mike Lindner, Leaving Terror Behind: A Boy's Journey to Painting Over the Past, page 49
2. 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. 1998, Steven J. L. Taylor, Desegregation in Boston and Buffalo: The Influence of Local Leaders, page 15
   By 1960 the growth and development of Chicago's black areas of residence confirmed the existence of the city's second ghetto. 1998, Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960, page 253
3. 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. 2006, Gay tourism: culture and context, Gordon Waitt, Kevin Markwell, page 201
   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. 2007, Romania & Moldova, Robert Reid, Leif Pettersen, page 190
   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, […] 2001, Justin Taylor, The Gospel of Anarchy: A Novel, page 64
4. (figurative, sometimes derogatory) 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. 1983, Eric S. Rabkin, Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology, Oxford University Press, page 249
   Invent is undoubtedly the wrong word, but the push from government was crucial in getting the Internet out of its academic ghetto. 2012, Andrew Blum, Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet
   2016 January 10, Quentin Tarantino, 73rd Golden Globe Awards Ennio Morricone... is my favourite composer - and when I say favourite composer, I don't mean movie composer - that ghetto. I'm talking about Mozart, I'm talking about Beethoven, I'm talking about Schubert. That's who I'm talking about.

adj

1. 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. 2012, Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, page 50
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!
   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. 2005, Ramon Carrasco, Army Life: The First Four Months in My First Duty Station, page 15
   In some kind of warped hometown loyalty, sometime during the conversation folks would stake their claim to owning the bottom. Philly is more ghetto than D.C. Or is it that DC. is more ghetto than Philly? Or Dallas (LA) is more ghetto than LA. 2007, Cora Daniels, Ghettonation: A Journey Into the Land of Bling and Home of the Shameless, page 11
   One guest did not pay. One of my checks remained open. They bolted and hit the service door. A walkout. Very ghetto. 2010, Deborah J. Hultin, WaitStress, page 115
   It was like an awesome trip walking though the old house on Douglas, a lot had changed and my dad had it looking more ghetto than ever. He had a dog that he was watching while a buddy of his was in prison. It was a female Rottweiler 2011, Taylor Goetz, 169 Pages Of My Life, page 61
3. (US, informal, often derogatory or offensive) 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. 2002, Russell Simmons, Life and Def: Sex, Drugs, Money, + God, page 26
   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. 2007, S. L. Mitchell, Gypsy's Crossing
   I beat up my kid's principal. Can you get any more ghetto than that? 2005, Chester Kelly Robinson, The Strong Silent Type
   He wasn't lying because, truth be told, I looked a lot like Halle Berry, only I was much thicker in all the right places and I was way more ghetto than Halle. And I had the tattoos and the attitude to match. 2008, Mark Anthony, “So Seductive”, in Around the Way Girls 5, page 244
   Oh yeah, we played the whole thing, I mean we was acting more ghetto than what we was. We was talking slangs and giving dabs every time we said so 2010, Timothy Black, When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers On and Off the Streets, page 93
   Kesha rang us up, and instructed another girl in the back to add extra food to the bag. "Your girl is kinda ghetto ain't she?" I asked when we left the store. "No more ghetto than anyone else around here" he replied, 2010, T. S. Weatherspoon, The Promise, page 20
4. Having been raised in a ghetto in the United States.

verb

1. 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. 1964, James A. Atkins, The age of Jim Crow, page 274
   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. 2001, Paul Johnson, Modern Times Revised Edition: World from the Twenties to the Nineties, page 526