Word.ws English Dictionary

back-to-back

/ˌbæk.təˈbæk/

back-to-back adjective: sequential or consecutive. Also the alternative form of back to back.

Adjective

back-to-back (not comparable)

  1. Sequential or consecutive.
    • Ruth and Gehrig hit back-to-back home runs.
    • They sat through two back-to-back movies.
  2. With one's back facing that of somebody else.
  3. (broadly) Emerging in exactly opposite directions.
    • Seen in laboratory frame the photon-jet pair is not any longer back-to-back and the energy balance is distorted.2009, R. Fiore, Alessandro Papa, Igor Ivanov, Jacques Soffer, Diffraction 2008: International Workshop on Diffraction in High Energy Physics, Amer Inst of Physics
    • This produces two back-to-back jets of hadrons that dominate the inclusive high energy cross-section.2000, S. Söldner-Rembold, Photon '99: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Structure and Interactions of the Photon, Including the 12th International Workshop on Photon-Photon...
  4. Having a party wall at the rear.
    • We lived in a row of back-to-back houses.
  5. (slang) Synonym of wired (“being a pair in seven card stud with one face up and one face down”).
    Synonyms:
    wired

Noun

back-to-back (plural back-to-backs)

  1. A house with a party wall at the rear.
  2. (oil industry) One of a pair of rig workers who are rostered on alternately.
    • "He's been standing-by in town for the last week, talk to his back-to-back on the rig in the morning." ("Back-to-back" is the man on the rig who does your job when you're not there.2005, Paul Carter, Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, page 101

Also used as

back-to-back is also the alternative form of back to back.

Examples of back-to-back in a sentence

  • The only problem was that my dad watched the news at 5:30, and Pokémon episodes were back-to-back, which meant I had to miss an episode every day, something I whined on and on about.2009 November 14, Camden Lamont, 1999, in Creepypasta, archived from the original on 21 Aug 2020:
  • Photons at leading order are produced back-to-back with an associated parton with nearly identical transverse momenta.2015, Thomas Schörner-Sadenius, The Large Hadron Collider: Harvest of Run 1, Springer, →ISBN, page 392:
  • In the rest frame of the #92;pi⁰ the photons emerge back-to-back isotropically.1992, David Shaw Brown, A Comparison of High Transverse Momentum Direct Photon and Neutral Pion Events in Negative Pion and Proton-nucleus...

Synonyms of back-to-back

Forms of back-to-back

pluralback-to-backs

Phrases with back-to-back

Questions about back-to-back

What does back-to-back mean?
Back-to-back means sequential or consecutive.
How do you use back-to-back in a sentence?
The only problem was that my dad watched the news at 5:30, and Pokémon episodes were back-to-back, which meant I had to miss an episode every day, something I whined on and on about.
What part of speech is back-to-back?
Back-to-back can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce back-to-back?
Back-to-back is pronounced /ˌbæk.təˈbæk/.

Words near back-to-back in the dictionary

  1. back-taxies
  2. back-taxiing
  3. back-taxis
  4. back-taxying
  5. back-timing
  6. back-to-back
  7. back-to-back connection
  8. back-to-back connections
  9. back-to-back loan
  10. back-to-back loans
  11. back-to-back-to-back

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: back-to-back (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-back-to-back.wav.

Cite this entry: “back-to-back.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/back-to-back. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.