How to Use slum in a Sentence

slum

1 of 2 noun
  • He grew up in the slums of New York.
  • The person in the slum doesn’t have the money to go to a school.
    — Diana Tsai, Forbes, 26 Oct. 2021
  • Then the train passes a slum, where a boy stands barefoot on the side of the road.
    — Washington Post, 1 Oct. 2020
  • The housing projects and this slum merge to the east of our neighborhood.
    — Mariana Enriquez, The New Yorker, 6 Feb. 2023
  • Afterwards, our team even set up schools in slum areas.
    — Sonya Rehman, Forbes.com, 8 Aug. 2025
  • This takes her to the city’s slum areas, where gang violence is rife.
    — Martin Dale, Variety, 1 Dec. 2021
  • The viewer floats over slums, a strip mine, an artisanal sulfur mine.
    — Carolina A. Miranda, Los Angeles Times, 12 Oct. 2023
  • Putin spoke like a gangster, like a gopnik, like someone from the Leningrad slums.
    — David Remnick, The New Yorker, 24 June 2023
  • In the narrow alleys of the Karachi slums, the police move through homes, day and night.
    — Zia Ur-Rehman, New York Times, 23 Nov. 2023
  • Other tech firms have come to the Dreams slum as part of the Favela 3D project.
    — Angelica Mari, WIRED, 18 Aug. 2023
  • It’s paired down close quarters combat in an inescapable slum, and the hits feel so real your own body will start to hurt.
    — Jordan Crucchiola, Vulture, 15 Jan. 2021
  • The unemployed would be put to work in slum clearance, road building and other public works projects.
    — Michael Bernick, Forbes, 19 July 2022
  • One of those projects was an elevated train line in a Caracas slum called Petare.
    — William Neuman, The Atlantic, 7 Mar. 2022
  • Two-thirds of the city’s population lived in abject poverty in slums built in medieval times.
    — Dan McLaughlin, National Review, 26 Dec. 2023
  • The names and house numbers of slum dwellers who are showcasing Covid symptoms are noted down.
    — Ananya Bhattacharya, Quartz, 10 June 2021
  • On the other side of the fence, where today stand residential high-rises, were slums.
    — Gabrielle Glancy, Rolling Stone, 9 May 2026
  • The rich-poor gap grew, and Tehran became surrounded by slums full of unemployed young men.
    — Arash Azizi, The Atlantic, 5 Aug. 2025
  • The study found that 16% were from urban slum areas, and the rest from other urban areas.
    — Aniruddha Ghosal, Star Tribune, 11 Sep. 2020
  • In the urban slum areas, people have access to fresh water only twice a day in the morning and evening.
    — Cecilia Rodriguez, Forbes, 6 May 2022
  • There is a lot of gang activity in these different slums in Lagos and a lot of gang wars as well.
    — Scott Roxborough, The Hollywood Reporter, 21 Apr. 2023
  • There’s even one in 23 de Enero, a huge, desperately poor slum.
    — Alex Vasquez, Bloomberg.com, 4 Oct. 2020
  • More than half of Mumbai's slum residents might have had Covid-19.
    — Eliza MacKintosh, CNN, 13 Aug. 2020
  • In Mumbai, too, this kind of support was key in the slums and among the homeless population.
    — Saumya Roy, The Dial, 6 Jan. 2026
  • As a fan of the coach, the January slum, every freaking year, is angering many fans.
    — Stephen Means, cleveland, 30 Jan. 2023
  • The men of the slum left for work early too, often to jobs as day laborers, garbage collectors, or rickshaw pullers.
    — Sonia Paul, Wired, 1 Mar. 2022
  • In 2010, three of her six children were crushed to death in their home in a downtown slum during the earthquake.
    — New York Times, 13 July 2021
  • There’s a program run by a family friend that lives in Uganda that helps people trying to get jobs and leave the slums.
    — Hank Beckman, Chicago Tribune, 2 Mar. 2026
  • Bajwa transports you into the heart of Amritsar, with its glitzy bazaars, dusty slums, and plush mansions.
    — The Week Us, TheWeek, 27 May 2026
  • The tiny makeshift homes that line the city’s streets and make up its slums are filled with children, neighbors, friends, and close and distant family members.
    — Saumya Roy, The Dial, 6 Jan. 2026
  • In 1954, the state of Maryland declared this neighborhood to be a slum.
    — Jacques Kelly, Baltimore Sun, 3 Sep. 2022

slum

2 of 2 verb
  • He sometimes likes to go slumming in bars around the city.
  • This is their third straight year slumming it in the play-in.
    — Dieter Kurtenbach, Mercury News, 13 Apr. 2026
  • Baxter was obviously slumming in the teen market, as his songs are all wonky and askew—a square’s take on hip tunes.
    — Stephen Deusner, SPIN, 22 Jan. 2024
  • Repeatedly slumming it in the NIT isn’t what anyone signed up for.
    — Bill Oram, oregonlive, 21 Mar. 2023
  • Auntie calls her a poser out to slum it with the blue-collars, an accusation Mildred answers with a slap.
    — Andrea Simakis, cleveland.com, 9 Dec. 2017
  • Along with goths, drag queens, rockers, leather boys and slumming socialites, the Limelight became the home to the ’90s club kid moment.
    — Alex Williams, New York Times, 2 Apr. 2020
  • The already legendary guitarist gets extra kudos for slumming it and taking the tube to The O2, rather than a limo.
    — Richard Smirke, Billboard, 19 Feb. 2020
  • Booted out of his royal Windsor lodgings, was slumming it on the king’s private estate in Norfolk.
    — Lorraine Ali, Los Angeles Times, 19 Feb. 2026
  • Such disrespect both for viewers and for the art of movies is the kind that only a successful novelist slumming it in the gaudy halls of the film business could afford.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 11 Dec. 2023
  • Toffs in the Tory party who despise liberal meddlers had the momentum at last behind their cause, as well as the thrill of slumming it with boisterous blue-collar types.
    — Tina Brown, Time, 6 June 2019
  • That book was mocked for being Wolfe slumming his way into capturing the contemporary college experience.
    — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 15 Sep. 2023
  • Abby’s beloved grandfather (Ron Cephas Jones, slumming it) gives her an old-fashioned wooden advent calendar.
    — Constance Grady, Vox, 2 Nov. 2018
  • Polanski gathers a crew of rich bumblers and slumming swells, setting the entire film on New Year’s Eve of 1999.
    — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 2 Sep. 2023
  • Seasons 4 and 5 saw the four main characters all get promoted to junior lieutenants, after slumming it as ensigns for the majority of the series.
    — Wilson Chapman, IndieWire, 18 Dec. 2024
  • The reasons vary — scripts change, directors don’t share the actors’ visions, studio executives meddle, actors slum for a payday, whatever.
    — Bill Goodykoontz, The Arizona Republic, 22 Apr. 2021
  • No matter how huffy the establishment gets about members slumming in Trumpworld, don’t expect the holier-than-thou act to last for more than a heartbeat after said members return to the fold.
    — Michelle Cottle, The Atlantic, 21 Sep. 2017
  • No one had any right to expect much of this new Ocean’s Eleven, which on paper looked like a smug cavalcade of Hollywood royalty slumming their way through an ultra-stylish crime caper.
    — Tim Grierson, Vulture, 7 July 2021
  • The Filipino-language thriller follows Dahlia, a disillusioned police aide who steals money from the safe of her corrupt police chief boss, distributing it to slum dwellers whose homes were destroyed.
    — Naman Ramachandran, Variety, 19 Mar. 2025
  • Dahlia, a disillusioned police aide, breaks into the mansion of the corrupt police chief Bernal and steals the money from his safe, unloading the funds to slum dwellers whose settlement Bernal razed down.
    — Matthew Carey, Deadline, 15 May 2026
  • Dahlia, a disillusioned police aide, breaks into the mansion of the corrupt police chief Bernal and steals the money from his safe, unloading the funds to slum dwellers whose settlement Bernal razed down.
    — Kate Erbland, IndieWire, 14 May 2026
  • In both films, Andy is A Serious Journalist who’s slumming it in the land of Valentino, McQueen and Lacroix.
    — Damon Wise, Deadline, 29 Apr. 2026
  • Years of doing comedy and doing improv comedy taught me so many things about pacing, timing, stamina, how to manage physicality — and doing stage work, doing theater, slumming away on the stage, sometimes for no one.
    — Ew Staff, EW.com, 22 Nov. 2023
  • The programming and community hub is named for the late Meow Wolf co-founder who spent a lot of time slumming at the mall before heading to Santa Fe to play with trash, sweep floors and lay the groundwork for the group’s expansion.
    — James Russell, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 18 June 2024
  • Running in the former Pyramid Club space (imagine a small sweaty party in the 1980s where celebrities slummed it with art kids), Night Club 101 has become the room every independent musician wants to play.
    — The Editors, Curbed, 15 Dec. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'slum.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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