shantytown
Americannoun
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shantytowns
plural
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a section, as of a city or town characterized by shanties and crudely built houses.
-
a whole town or city that is chiefly made up of shantylike houses.
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of shantytown
Explanation
A shantytown is a makeshift settlement established by impoverished people. India, Pakistan, and Mexico all currently have fairly large shantytowns. A shanty is a rough dwelling, a word that derives from Scottish Gaelic roots meaning "old" and "house." A community made up of shanties, built from foraged materials like wood, metal, and cardboard, and inhabited by people experiencing homelessness and poverty, is a shantytown. Most of them are found in developing countries, but thousands of Americans lived in shantytowns during the Great Depression, and wealthy cities including Madrid and Los Angeles are home to shantytowns today.
Vocabulary lists containing shantytown
South America - Middle School
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The Great Depression and The New Deal
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South America - High School
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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.
See Examples For:
In 1953, a fire destroyed a shantytown called Shek Kip Mei, leaving more than 53,000 people homeless.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 27, 2025
Their shantytown, nestled in the middle-class neighbourhood of Jodhpur Park, thrummed with life.
From BBC ● Dec. 16, 2024
From the plane you can see this sprawling shantytown.
From New York Times ● Nov. 27, 2022
In a burst of Coleridgian inspiration, she writes: “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.”
From Washington Post ● Nov. 15, 2022
I was born to them at a time when they were living in a shantytown in Port-au-Prince and had nothing.
From "Krik? Krak!" by Edwidge Danticat
This contributed to the creation of shantytowns surrounding urban centers in Tehran and other cities.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 16, 2025
Some 50,000 people are expected in Belem, which is home to 1.4 million residents, more than half of whom live in shantytowns.
From Barron's ● Oct. 31, 2025
As a result, many of them settled in shantytowns on the city’s outskirts, living in makeshift sheet-metal homes.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 24, 2025
While Kenya's security forces have experience battling the al-Shabab Islamist militant group, and policing slum settlements, they will be on alien ground in Port-au-Prince's harbourside and hillside shantytowns.
From BBC ● Sep. 28, 2023
Those who stood the best chance of contracting TB, which was usually spread by the infected person coughing or sneezing, lived in crowded peasant huts, urban slums, shantytowns, prisons, or homeless shelters.
From "Mountains Beyond Mountains" by Tracy Kidder and Michael French
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
