ghost town

noun

: a once-flourishing town wholly or nearly deserted usually as a result of the exhaustion of some natural resource

Examples of ghost town in a Sentence

After all the gold was mined, the place became a ghost town.

Recent Examples on the Web The shooting turned Lewiston, Maine’s second-biggest city, into a ghost town. —

Alex Seitz-Wald, NBC News, 27 Oct. 2023 Without Taylor Swift and Martin Scorsese, the October box office would have been a ghost town long before Halloween hit. —

Rebecca Rubin, Variety, 24 Oct. 2023 From Patagonia, the Spirit World’s 50-mile course (actually 57 miles) rises through the Patagonia Mountains on a 17-mile gradual climb, then descends to the Mexican border and Lochiel, a ghost town. —

Cindy Hirschfeld, New York Times, 4 Oct. 2023 San Francisco's retail hub is turning into a ghost town. —

Julia Cherner, ABC News, 19 Nov. 2023 Lewiston, the second-most-populous locality in Maine with about 38,000 residents, was a ghost town on Thursday. —

Petula Dvorak, Washington Post, 26 Oct. 2023 Another great option is to visit Rhyolite, an old ghost town just west of Beatty. —

Evie Carrick, Travel + Leisure, 11 Sep. 2023 Correspondent Christina Ruffini reports on opportunities for someone in the market to own a town of their very own, from a 55-acre village in Maine, to a sprawling Rocky Mountain ghost town. —

David Morgan, CBS News, 27 July 2023 Lewiston, the state’s second-largest city, resembled a ghost town, with many businesses closed. —

Phil Helsel, NBC News, 28 Oct. 2023 See More

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