Slum

How to spell slum

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce slum

What does slum mean?

1. nounA crowded, run-down area of a city where people live in poor, often overcrowded housing.
2. verbTo accept conditions or surroundings that are less comfortable than you are used to, usually in the phrase 'slum it'.

Slum in a sentence

• noun

  The charity builds clean water points in the slum on the edge of the city.

• verb

  On the cheaper holiday they had to slum it in a tiny shared hostel.

• noun

  Developers cleared the old slum and replaced it with affordable flats.

• verb

  The executives agreed to slum it in economy seats for the short flight.

Where does slum come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

Slum first appears in English in the early 1800s as a piece of London street slang, where it originally meant a room, especially a back room or a cheap lodging. From that narrow sense it widened to describe a whole street or district of crowded, run-down housing where the poorest people lived. Its deeper origin is genuinely uncertain: lexicographers connect it loosely to cant and thieves' jargon of the period, and some link it to dialect words for mud, mire, or a swampy place, which fits the squalid associations the word soon carried. By the Victorian era reformers and journalists had made slum a standard term for urban poverty, and the verb to slum, meaning to visit poor districts out of curiosity, grew from the same source. Because the spelling is short and phonetic, the chief thing to remember is simply the single l and the single final m.

How the word is built

• slum (single root, no prefix or suffix)