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
Michtom, who emigrated in 1888 from an impoverished shtetl in the Russian Pale of Settlement, noted that the czar “was never that humanitarian.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 12, 2026
Not long after Jewish author Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" had launched second-wave feminism, Harnick introduced the shtetl of Anatevka and its quaint ways through a song about unequal gender roles.
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 had no idea what a shtetl was but felt stupid admitting that to him.
From Anya and the Nightingale by Sofiya Pasternack
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
Potatoes, which became popular around the mid-19th century, made their way into kugel as an inexpensive and filling starch, and eventually became popular across impoverished shtetls.
From Washington Post ● Mar. 16, 2021
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
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.
