Hooverville
Americannoun
Etymology
Origin of Hooverville
After (Herbert) Hoover, then-president of the United States + -ville )
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
They called it Hoover Town — a variation of Hooverville, the title given to many such homeless camps around the nation in sardonic tribute to President Hoover.
From Los Angeles Times • Jul. 10, 2025
He’s there when Mason visits the Gallardo family’s Hooverville to ferret out the initial tip about Ozzie and his Converse shoes.
From New York Times • Apr. 3, 2023
Scaled up to a necropolis, it could make the right impression, a modernist Hooverville of death in the shadow of our great national charnel house of inaction.
From Washington Post • May 25, 2022
April’s numbers are more on par with the 1931 unemployment rate, based on data drawn from the Historical Statistics of the United States.1 For the moment, we’re living in Hooverville.
From Slate • May 8, 2020
In Hooverville tin roofs cartwheeled across the sky and shanties were simply shredded, leaving their denizens standing dazed among the wreckage.
From "The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics" by Daniel James Brown
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
