food desert
/fud ˈdɛzɚt/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.36 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "For years, major supermarket chains have been criticized for abandoning densely populated, largely black and Latino communities in cities like Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis and Newark, N.J. — contributing to what many experts call food deserts."
- "More precisely, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines a food desert as any census district where at least 20 percent of the inhabitants are below the poverty line and 33 percent live over a mile from the nearest supermarket (or in rural areas, more than 10 miles)."
- "New Orleans' Ninth Ward is what the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls a "food desert." Food deserts are communities with little or no access to healthy food."
Etymology
A report by Cummins and Macintyre states that a resident of public housing in western Scotland supposedly coined the more specific phrase food desert in the early 1990s. The phrase was first officially used in a document in 1995 from a policy working group on the Low Income Project Team of the UK's Nutrition Task Force.
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /fud ˈdɛzɚt/
- British English: /fuːd ˈdɛzə(ɹ)t/