back of beyond
back of beyond noun: a very remote place.
Noun
the back of beyond
- A very remote place.
- [Y]ou, wi’ some o’ your auld warld stories, that the mind o’ man canna resist, whirl’d them to the back o’ beyont to look at the auld Roman camp—[…]1816, [Walter Scott], chapter II, in The Antiquary. […], volume I, Edinburgh: […] James Ballantyne and Co. for Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, →OCLC, page...
- It was a regular outside bush township, and though the distance oughtn't to have much to say to people's honesty, you'll mostly find that these far-out back-of-beyond places have got men and women to match 'em.1882, Rolf Boldrewood, Robbery Under Arms
- Synonyms:
- beyond the black stump, remote place
Synonyms of back of beyond
- beyond the black stump
- remote place
Origin of back of beyond
First attested in the Scottish novelist Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816; see quotation). It is quite possible that Scott anglicised a rural expression rather than coined it himself—something he did numerous times with other phrases.
Questions about back of beyond
- What does back of beyond mean?
- Back of beyond means a very remote place.
- What part of speech is back of beyond?
- Back of beyond is a noun.
Words near back of beyond in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: back of beyond (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: EN-AU ck1 back of beyond.ogg.
Cite this entry: “back of beyond.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/back_of_beyond. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.