What does ghetto mean

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Take the quiz. Words form: ghettoes ghettos. See word origin. The definition of a ghetto is an area of a city where poor people live, with typically higher rates of crime and where racial and religious groups are discriminated against. An example of a ghetto is South Central Los Angeles. A usually poor section of a city inhabited primarily by people of the same race, religion, or social background, often because of discrimination.

In a manner typical or stereotypical of an impoverished urban area, as in being makeshift, garish, or crass. In certain European cities, a section to which Jews were formerly restricted.

Any section of a city in which many members of some minority group live, or to which they are restricted as by economic pressure or social discrimination. From the 16th to the 18th century, the institution of the legally compulsory and physically enclosed exclusively Jewish enclave spread to Rome, Florence Mantua and a host of other Italian towns and cities.

The Venetian label stuck, and these mandatory Jewish areas throughout Italy came to be called ghettos too. The emancipation of the Jews of Italy starting in the late 18th century led to the dismantling of these ghettos, culminating in the dissolution of the last surviving ghetto in Europe—the ghetto of Rome—in But the word was harder to get rid of.

These areas were densely crowded but legally voluntary and more mixed between Jews and non-Jews in reality than in popular perception. As places of mass starvation and disease, and eventually of deportation to the death camps and killing fields, however, the Nazi ghettos bore little in common with the original Italian ghettos beyond the name.

Such laws were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in A report on Segregation in Washington —published the same year that the Supreme Court banned judicial enforcement of restrictive covenants in Shelley v. To any Nazi victim.