Word.ws English Dictionary

back burners

back burners is the plural of back burner.

Meaning of back burner

Noun

back burner (plural back burners)

  1. (countable) A section of a stove used to keep some pots warm while one focuses on others.
    • In restaurants, the back burner is the place that chefs leave their sauces and soup stocks to simmer while they are engaged in other, more immediately pressing, and faster operations on the front burners.2005, David Rosenwasser, Jill Stephen, Writing Analytically, Cengage Learning, →ISBN, page 38
    Antonyms:
    front burner
  2. (figuratively, uncountable) A state of low urgency; a state of low current importance.
    • We'll put next year's Christmas party on the back burner until we deal with the current financial crisis.
    Antonyms:
    front burner

Questions about back burners

What is back burners the plural of?
Back burners is the plural of back burner.

Words near back burners in the dictionary

  1. back bones
  2. back buffer
  3. back buffers
  4. back burn
  5. back burner
  6. back burners
  7. back burns
  8. back butter
  9. back buttered
  10. back buttering
  11. back butters

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: back burners (page history and authors); back burner (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.

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