Chinatown

How to spell chinatown

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce chinatown

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chinatown mean?

1. nounA district of a city, usually in a Western country, with a concentrated Chinese population, shops, and restaurants.

Chinatown in a sentence

• The tourists wandered through chinatown looking for an authentic dumpling house.

• Every February the chinatown in our city hosts a Lunar New Year parade.

Where does chinatown come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Chinatown is a transparent English compound formed by joining the country name China with the ordinary English word town, which traces back to the Old English 'tun', originally meaning an enclosure or homestead before it came to mean a settlement. The name China itself reached English through Latin and Portuguese from older Asian sources, often connected to the Qin dynasty that once ruled the region. The compound emerged in the nineteenth century to label the urban districts where Chinese immigrants settled, especially in port cities of North America, Australia, and Britain. Early uses appear in American newspapers describing the Chinese quarters of San Francisco and New York. Because both halves are everyday English words, the only real spelling decision is whether to capitalise it and whether to keep it as one word, which is now the settled convention.

How the word is built

• China (the country name)
• town (settlement)