desolate vs ghetto

desolate

adj
  • Dismal or dreary. 

  • Made unfit for habitation or use because of neglect, destruction etc. 

  • Barren and lifeless. 

  • Deserted and devoid of inhabitants. 

  • Sad, forlorn and hopeless. 

verb
  • To devastate or lay waste somewhere. 

  • To abandon or forsake something. 

  • To deprive of inhabitants. 

  • To make someone sad, forlorn and hopeless. 

ghetto

adj
  • Unseemly and indecorous or of low quality; cheap; shabby, crude. 

  • Having been raised in a ghetto in the United States. 

  • Characteristic of the style, speech, or behavior of residents of a predominantly black or other ghetto in the United States. 

  • Of or relating to a ghetto or to ghettos in general. 

noun
  • An (often walled) area of a city in which Jews are concentrated by force and law. (Used particularly of areas in medieval Italy and in Nazi-controlled Europe.) 

  • An area in which people who are distinguished by sharing something other than ethnicity concentrate or are concentrated. 

  • An (often impoverished) area of a city inhabited predominantly by members of a specific nationality, ethnicity, or race. 

  • An isolated, self-contained, segregated subsection, area or field of interest; often of minority or specialist interest. 

verb
  • To confine (a specified group of people) to a ghetto. 

How often have the words desolate and ghetto occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )