pogrom

1 of 2

noun

po·​grom pə-ˈgräm 

-ˈgrəm,

pō-;

ˈpō-grəm,

ˈpä- 

: an organized massacre of helpless people

specifically : such a massacre of Jews

pogrom

2 of 2

verb

pogromed; pogroming; pogroms

transitive verb

: to massacre or destroy in a pogrom

Examples of pogrom in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Noun

The Pale is shorthand for the Pale of Settlement, an area of Eastern Europe which was, from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries, the only place Jews could live legally in the Russian Empire (though this didn’t prevent frequent pogroms). —Benjamin Dubow, Longreads, 20 Feb. 2024

Support for the Whites was hard to portray as a righteous cause because of the Whites’ involvement in horrific Jewish pogroms. —Anna Reid, Foreign Affairs, 20 Feb. 2024

My great-grandfather escaped the pogroms in Poland and settled in East London in 1910. —Hazlitt, 6 Mar. 2024

Then came Russian Jewish migrants, fleeing the pogroms of tsarist Russia; and then, finally, Polish, German and Austrian Jewish people escaping the Nazis. —Anastasia Tsioulcas, NPR, 29 Feb. 2024

Meteoric Rise And Omission Janet Sobel (b. 1893; Dnipro, Ukraine) emigrated with her mother and two siblings to New York in 1908 after her father was killed in one of Ukraine’s many pogroms. —Chadd Scott, Forbes, 22 Feb. 2024

Last spring, the school board in Santa Ana Unified, in Orange County, approved a 10th-grade ethnic studies class that covers the displacement of Native American tribes, gentrification in American cities and early 20th-century Russian pogroms of Jews. —Dana Goldstein, New York Times, 16 Feb. 2024

This horrific pogrom creates the fulcrum for Słobodzianek’s play, which follows ten classmates in Jedwabne, five Catholic and five Jewish, from early childhood to the end of each of their lives. —Sara Holdren, Vulture, 25 Jan. 2024

The photograph was taken in 1941, during the Lviv pogroms in Ukraine. —Robin Abcarian, The Mercury News, 15 Feb. 2024

Word History

Etymology

Noun

Yiddish, from Russ, literally, devastation

First Known Use

Noun

1891, in the meaning defined above

Verb

1915, in the meaning defined above