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
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
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
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
“Nicer than anything any of the girls in our shtetl or Fayge’s have. All the other girls will be jealous.”
From "The Devil's Arithmetic" by Jane Yolen
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
The new translations are being read by people interested in everyday life in East European shtetls and immigrant ghettos in the United States as told from a woman’s perspective.
From New York Times ● Feb. 6, 2022
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
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
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.
