Word of the Day:
shtetl
What It Means
A Jewish village or small town, especially one in Eastern Europe.
Shtetl in Context
“Most of the second-generation immigrant kids of his neighborhood had been […] as desperate to go to college and become lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and leave the teeming city for the suburbs, as their parents had been to leave behind the shtetls of Russia.”
Did You Know?
From Yiddish שטעטל (shtetl, “small town, village”), from שטאָט (shtot, “city”) + ־ל (-l, “diminutive suffix”) (compare German Städtl, Swabian Städtele), from Old High German stat, from Proto-West Germanic *stadi, from Proto-Germanic *stadiz, from Proto-Indo-European *stéh₂tis. Doublet of stead.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: shtetl (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “shtetl.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shtetl. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
