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:
Henry Roth was born in a Galician shtetl in what is now Ukraine, and immigrated to the U.S. as an infant.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 19, 2026
It’s 1905, and Anatevka isn’t the shtetl that it once was.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 15, 2025
“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
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
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
Because they were freer here than anywhere else in Russia’s Pale of Settlement, the area of the empire where they were generally confined, Jews flocked from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to this booming port.
From New York Times ● Aug. 19, 2022
In the eastern European shtetls, and long before, Jewish families planned all week for their Friday Shabbat meal.
From Washington Post ● May 3, 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.
