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slum
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
slum
I.noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a slum district (=where poor people live in very bad conditions)
▪ Rats were running all over the slum districts.
snow/land/slum etc clearance
▪ flooding caused by forest clearance
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
area
▪ As the city slumbers, a slum area in a remote corner of the metropolis goes up in flames.
▪ It was, of course, laudable to clear the rookeries; essential to drive new roads through slum areas.
▪ Their only recourse was to crowd into the slum areas around.
▪ Humorous description of the appearance and the denizens of this slum area of London.
child
▪ Most slum children do not go to school, are very poor, and speak only Hindi.
▪ None the less, ignorance and poverty continue to claim victims, particularly malnourished slum children, who are the most susceptible.
▪ Who tells Nestle not to promote the bottle feeding that may give a slum child fatal diarrhoea?
▪ Ragged slum children, singing their absurd street rhymes.
city
▪ In the sequel, Whoopi will play a nun who helps a gospel choir in a city slum.
▪ Not in urban development, not in city slum clearance, not in social welfare.
▪ And what offends against it is the mill chimney and the steam engine, factory-labour and the city slum.
▪ But land reform could create the jobs which poor people from rural areas seek in city slums.
▪ We no longer allow the weak or foolish or unfortunate to perish in the gutters of a city slum.
clearance
▪ But the end of slum clearance came more with a change in values: away from demolition, to conservation and rehabilitation.
▪ However, slum clearance and replacement was for the poor.
▪ It also extended them to cover land affected by new town designation orders, slum clearance orders and new street orders.
▪ Not in urban development, not in city slum clearance, not in social welfare.
▪ On a big estate - slum clearance - in the North.
▪ Elsewhere slum clearance activity was much more piecemeal and avoided spectacular set pieces.
▪ The Chamberlain Act also provided for subsidising slum clearance schemes.
▪ Finally, dissatisfaction with housing conditions produced schemes for slum clearance or improvement and substantial house-building programmes.
dweller
▪ Answers to these questions have important implications for slum dwellers, whose only local source of medical care may be private doctors.
▪ Half the populations of Delhi, Nairobi, and Manila are slum dwellers.
■ VERB
live
▪ The friend is called Bobby and he lives in a slum near the city centre.
▪ The distant workers who supported this wealth lived in noisome slums.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ I grew up in the East London slums.
▪ Maria lives with her eight children in a slum outside Montevideo.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A great deal of money has been spent conserving a block of less-than-distinguished Victorian slums and warehouses.
▪ He resumed his familiar whirlwind visits to the Lima slums, feeding on the energy of friendly crowds.
▪ In the slums you can now hear the children singing.
▪ Or Pavitra, who drinks contaminated water in her Delhi slum.
▪ The overall effect was that the world's largest and richest city of the time contained the world's most extensive slums.
II.verb
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ She made it clear that she was just slumming for a while in this business.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Perhaps they were also saying - you can not go slumming, not in New York.
▪ With other upper-middle-class young men who were studying art, Toulouse-Lautrec began slumming it in bohemian Montmartre.
▪ You just can not go slumming, because slumming pretends that slums aren't real.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Slum

Slum \Slum\ (sl[u^]m), n. [CF. Slump, n.]

  1. A foul back street of a city, especially one filled with a poor, dirty, degraded, and often vicious population; any low neighborhood or dark retreat; -- usually in the plural; as, Westminster slums are haunts for theives.
    --Dickens.

  2. pl. (Mining) Same as Slimes.

Slum

Slum \Slum\ (sl[u^]m), v. i. To visit or frequent slums, esp. out of curiosity, or for purposes of study, etc. Also called go slumming. [Colloq.]

Related phrases:
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
slum

1845, from back slum "dirty back alley of a city, street of poor or low people" (1825), originally a slang or cant word meaning "room," especially "back room" (1812), of unknown origin, pastime popularized by East End novels. Related: slums. Slumscape is from 1947.

slum

"visit slums of a city," especially for diversion or amusement, often under guise of philanthropy, 1884, from slum (n.). Pastime popularized by East End novels. Earlier it meant to visit slums for disreputable purposes or in search of vice (1860). Related: Slumming.

Wiktionary
slum

n. A dilapidated neighborhood where many people live in a state of poverty. vb. 1 To visit a neighborhood of a status below one's own. 2 To associate with people or engage in activities with a status below one's own.

WordNet
slum

  1. v. visit slums for entertainment or out of curiosity

  2. [also: slumming, slummed]

slum

  1. n. a district of a city marked by poverty and inferior living conditions [syn: slum area]

  2. [also: slumming, slummed]

Related phrases:
Wikipedia
Slum

A slum is a heavily populated urban informal settlement characterized by substandard housing and squalor. While slums differ in size and other characteristics, most lack reliable sanitation services, supply of clean water, reliable electricity, timely law enforcement and other basic services. Slum residences vary from shanty houses to professionally built dwellings that because of poor-quality construction or provision of services have deteriorated into slums.

Slums were common in the 18th and early 20th centuries in the United States and Europe. More recently slums have been predominantly found in urban regions of developing and undeveloped parts of the world, but are also found in developed economies.

According to UN-Habitat, around 33% of the urban population in the developing world in 2012, or about 863 million people, lived in slums. The proportion of urban population living in slums was highest in Sub-Saharan Africa (61.7%), followed by South Asia (35%), Southeast Asia (31%), East Asia (28.2%), West Asia (24.6%), Oceania (24.1%), Latin America and the Caribbean (23.5%), and North Africa (13.3%). Among individual countries, the proportion of urban residents living in slum areas in 2009 was highest in the Central African Republic (95.9%). Between 1990 and 2010 the percentage of people living in slums dropped, even as the total urban population increased. The world's largest slum city is in Mexico City.

Slums form and grow in many different parts of the world for many different reasons. Some causes include rapid rural-to-urban migration, economic stagnation and depression, high unemployment, poverty, informal economy, poor planning, politics, natural disasters and social conflicts. Strategies tried to reduce and transform slums in different countries, with varying degrees of success, include a combination of slum removal, slum relocation, slum upgrading, urban planning with city wide infrastructure development, and public housing projects.

Slum (film)

Slum is a 2013 Indian Kannada language film directed by M. Mahesh Kumar. It stars Mayur Patel, Neha Patil, P. Murthy and Disha Poovaiah in pivotal roles. The film is based on a real-life crime that occurred in Bangalore, and received an 'A' certificate from Regional Censor Board.

Usage examples of "slum".

To her all the wreckage of the slums, all the woe lying beneath gilded life, all the abominations, all the tortures that remain unknown, were carried.

The Senne was bricked in, and the fine boulevards du Nord, Anspach, Hainaut and Midi took the place of slums.

Miss Hyacinth Anastasia Wallace, the one girl I thought had friend potential, turned out to be a Manhattan celebutante hoping to gain credibility by slumming at Pineville High for a marking period or two, then writing a book about it, which was optioned by Miramax before she completed the spell check on the last draft, and will be available in stores nationwide just in time for Christmas.

Mexican divorce from Tom Muldoon, Jenny had come across Chuchu Mondragon singing in the seedy Juarez night club she had chosen for an evening of slumming.

The clachan, through which he presently passed, was sodden, shabby and tumble-down, like a city slum transported to a sour upland.

The caravan passed through a black slum far out in the parish, crossed a bridge over a coulee, and turned down a shell road that led to a cluster of burial crypts in a cemetery by the bayou.

I asked him what he was planning to do without a diploma and he said he thought he might do some social work in the slums.

Calumet Street enters a slum where dregs settle to a small Skid Row, no less pitiable than the massive human swamps in New York, London, Moscow, Chicago, Calcutta.

Parasites and skin diseases, vicious habits and insanitary practices have been spread, as if in a passion of equalitarian propaganda, the slums of such centres as Glasgow, London and Liverpool, throughout the length and breadth of the land.

Here the squatters garnered practically the whole of their exiguous income, and their tenacious persistence was rapidly making the section degenerate toward a slum.

For there were more favela slums here, massive ones whose population rivaled that of the city proper.

In Yedo, at the limit of their money, Gekko and Shin managed to find safe lodgings in the slums of the city.

On the northeast side of the harbor were the slums of the Downwind District, with the human garbage heap called the Honeypot highest on the slope to the ridge.

And the occasion which produced that prosaic thought was a night well calculated to make one think of supper and fireside, though the one might be frugal and the other lonely, and as I, Gulliver Jones, the poor foresaid Navy lieutenant, with the honoured stars of our Republic on my collar, and an undeserved snub from those in authority rankling in my heart, picked my way homeward by a short cut through the dismalness of a New York slum I longed for steak and stout, slippers and a pipe, with all the pathetic keenness of a troubled soul.

Steel and Nina Malapert made their way into the Rookery, disguised under heavy cloaks and holo faces, with just enough hints about them to suggest they were two well-off ladies, slumming it in the Rookery for pleasures unobtainable in the more civilized parts of the city.