Third World
30
7.2
- noun
- /θɜrd wɜrld/
- Slur
:
Tercer Mundo
- Many non-governmental organizations focus on improving education in Third World countries.
- Third World countries
- Third World debt
- Third World development
Tucker Carlson says we've imported the third world and become the third world.
- Tucker Carlson says we've imported the third world and become the third world.
- Otherwise you have a Jeremy Corbyn situation where you turn into a third world.
- But that system itself still heavily relies on exploitation of the third world.
- And she was very interested in in what was going on in what, you know, we talked about the third world.
- Logue returned home, ready to apply lessons learned in what was now being called the Third World to his work turning around a struggling First World city.
- United States, Cubans, I mean, Americans, you know, on, on, on the left, they tend to do the same thing as people in the third world and on the right, the same thing as you know.
- We're first world at works in the third world where they're needing spend.
- And so because all that boomer capital supported the the third world.
- You know, so first world, third world is the thing that you're sold in developed nations is that you have everything.
Examples
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People in Third World countries often lack basic necessities like food and healthcare.
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Until recently, discussions on Third World debt were limited to the economic and financial spheres.
Academic text (1990) -
First of all, go online and look up some third world countries.
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And so the question of the status, nature and structure of the Third world is obviously wide open.
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It's like a Third World country out here.
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It's a project to feed the third world.
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We cannot fund the hopes and dreams of the entire Third World.
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His plan was to get his degree and then go to some third-world country and teach.
Fiction book (1990) -
This causes more deaths in the third world than malaria and AIDS combined.
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We cannot let our country further devolve into a Third World nation, and we won't.
Synonyms
3
4.8
Countries in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia and Oceania that are less wealthy than the Global North
How Developed
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase combines the ordinal 'third' and 'world', so a learner might guess it names a category or ranking of countries, but the specific geopolitical sense ('developing/low‑income countries') is a conventional, historical label that cannot be fully derived from the parts. Understanding the economic/development and potentially derogatory connotations requires prior exposure or cultural knowledge, although many languages have a direct equivalent, which gives partial cues.
Etymology
Third World was made during the Cold War to name the 'third' group of countries after the rich Western countries and the Soviet Union and its allies. Many of these places were poorer or 'non-aligned', so Third World came to mean 'developing countries', though today the phrase is often seen as outdated or offensive.