shtetl
Americannoun
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of shtetl
Yiddish, little town
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:
My father was born in a shtetl outside Kyiv — didn’t speak Russian, spoke Yiddish.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 2, 2026
When he finally relents, she discovers that the invading Nazi army has razed her shtetl and that its inhabitants, including her parents, are gone.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 22, 2026
“It really was shtetl Carlton, back then,” said Arnold Zable, 76, a writer who captured the community and area in his book “Scraps of Heaven.”
From New York Times ● Jul. 18, 2023
By setting Aleichem's words to Jerry Bock's Eastern European-inspired music, Harnick created a new mythological shtetl that Jews in America could be deeply proud of.
From Salon ● Jul. 8, 2023
I had tried using that name for a while, just another way to leave behind the shtetl.
From "The City Beautiful" by Aden Polydoros
His parents, Jacob, a plasterer, and Rel Goldman Topol, a seamstress, had fled shtetlach in Eastern Europe to settle in Palestine in the early 1930s.
From New York Times ● Mar. 9, 2023
The soup, redolent of the shtetlach of Thomas' Jewish forebears, speaks for itself.
From Time Magazine Archive
My own neighborhood was so homogeneous that my friends and I could have traced our families back to neighboring shtetls.
From New York Times ● Feb. 16, 2019
We read novels about the Holocaust with the burden of knowledge: the incalculable statistics, the sickening photos, the faint outlines of vanished shtetls.
From Washington Post ● Apr. 28, 2015
A recent Jerusalem Post piece details one professor's attempt to show how modern humor flows directly from the mean, aggressive, sarcastic, bleak humor practiced by "badkhn" entertainers in the Jewish shtetls of 17th-century Eastern Europe.
From Slate ● Mar. 15, 2011
Both parents had come to America before the First World War from Jewish shtetls, or small towns, outside Warsaw.
From The New Yorker ● Jan. 14, 1966
His teachings, which emphasized the immediacy of God's presence in everyday life, quickly swept through the shtetls of Eastern Europe.
From Time Magazine Archive
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.
