Meaning & use
favela
An informal, densely populated urban settlement in Brazil, often built without official planning or infrastructure.
See it in a sentence
The tour guide grew up in a favela on the hillside above Rio de Janeiro.
Community projects have brought running water and electricity to several favelas in recent years.
A note on using this word
Favela is a Brazilian Portuguese word now used in English specifically for these settlements, rather than as a generic term for any slum.
Words with a similar meaning
slumshantytown
Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.
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