shtetl
Americannoun
-
shtetlach,
plural
-
shtetls
plural
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
Luboml, formerly in Poland and now part of Ukraine, was one such a shtetl, to use the Yiddish word for town.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 16, 2026
In later years, Jewish studies professors have been less kind, complaining that Harnick's lyrics and Joseph Stein's book sentimentally sanitized the shtetl and misrepresented both Judaism and eastern European life.
From Salon ● Jul. 8, 2023
He later set up a village on the outskirts of Kyiv that he named Anatevka — like the fictional shtetl in the Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof” — for displaced Jewish families.
From New York Times ● Jul. 5, 2023
She’d climb trees, the tallest she could find, so that she might look out past her shtetl, her village, down the road and past the horizon.
From "Night Owls" by A.R. Vishny
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
Narayan's imaginary Indian village of Malgudi and Isaac Bashevis Singer's Polish shtetls, Ha Jin's Dismount Fort teems with vivid life and people who grow ever less strange as their struggles unfold.
From Time Magazine Archive
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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.
