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.
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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
A sense of despair has engulfed the migrant camp of La Soledad, named after the colonial-era church that towers over the shantytown in downtown Mexico City.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 26, 2025
Their shantytown, nestled in the middle-class neighbourhood of Jodhpur Park, thrummed with life.
From BBC ● Dec. 16, 2024
But as the Kurdish refugee from Iran quickly realized, dreams and despair were intertwined in the shantytown known as the Jungle.
From Washington Post ● Mar. 29, 2023
As I moved closer to the home where my host family lived, I couldn’t stop staring at the shantytown.
From "The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates" by Wes Moore
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
In 1967, at the invitation of Dr. Marian Wright Edelman, Bobby Kennedy had visited the poor shantytowns in the Mississippi Delta and saw personally the plight of the poor in that area.
From "While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age during the Civil Rights Movement" by Carolyn Maull McKinstry
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.
