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The Collaborative International Dictionary
shtetl

shtetl \shtetl\ (sht[e^]t"'l); pl. Eng. shtetls (sht[e^]t"'lz), Yiddish shtetlach (sht[e^]t"l[aum]kh)., n. A village or small town; -- usually referring to Jewish towns in Eastern Europe.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
shtetl

Jewish small town or village in Eastern Europe, 1949, from Yiddish, literally "little town," from diminutive of German Stadt "city, town," from Old High German stat "place," from PIE root *sta- "to stand" (see stet).

Wiktionary
shtetl

n. A Jewish village or small town, especially one in Eastern Europe.

Wikipedia
Shtetl

Shtetlekh (, shtetl (singular), שטעטלעך, shtetlekh (plural)) were small towns with large Jewish populations, which existed in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Shtetlekh were mainly found in the areas that constituted the 19th-century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, Galicia and Romania. In Yiddish, a larger city, like Lwów (Lviv) or Czernowice (Chernivtsi), was called a shtot (, ); a village was called a dorf . Non-Jews referred to the shtetl as Mestechko (Russian местечко, Polish miasteczko).

Usage examples of "shtetl".

Michael had diverged - or according to his appalled agnostic father, regressed into a sort of shtetl orthodoxy, while flashing ahead as a mathematician and physicist of extraordinary brilliance.

Shorter than his father, heavy-boned, with a flat Slavic face traceable to shtetl genes, Dov did not need good looks to fascinate a seventeen-year-old.