Third World

noun

(sometimes lowercase)

1. the underdeveloped nations of the world, especially those with widespread poverty.

2. the group of developing nations, especially of Asia and Africa, that do not align themselves with the policies of either the U.S. or the former Soviet Union.

3. the minority groups within a nation or predominant culture.

Third World

noun

1. Also called: developing world. the less economically advanced countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America collectively, esp when viewed as underdeveloped and as neutral in the East-West alignment

Third World

1. The nonaligned nations — which are often developing nations — of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. They are in a “third” group of nations because they were allied neither with the United States nor with the former Soviet Union.

Idioms and Phrases

Underdeveloped or developing countries, as in The conditions in our poorest rural areas resemble those in the third world. This expression originated in the mid-1900s, at first denoting those countries in Asia and Africa that were not aligned with either the Communist bloc nations or the non-Communist Western nations. Because they were for the most part poor and underdeveloped, the term was transferred to all countries with those characteristics, and later still to poorer groups within a larger prevailing culture.

Example Sentences

Trying to minimize the cost of deficits through interest rates is something Third World countries do, he added.

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Spearheaded by the Soviet Union, its satellites and anti-Western Third World countries, the “Z/r” resolution was intended to delegitimize the state of Israel.

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Mr. Easterly is not a friend of rich-world technocrats or top-down dispensers of aid and omniscience who frequently fail to consult the very people—the Third World poor—for whose salvation they get paid handsomely.

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“You guys have put us into a Third World situation,” Scott Dittrich, a resident of Malibu, said at a Sept. 30 meeting that the city had with Edison to address the shutoffs.

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He’s a man of the Marxist Third World left who came of age when Africa went through its messy, often violent, years of decolonization.

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