Word.ws English Dictionary

back of the book

back of the book noun: less important or less hard-hitting material relegated to the later pages of a print publication or the later stages of a television broadcast.

Noun

back of the book

  1. Less important or less hard-hitting material relegated to the later pages of a print publication or the later stages of a television broadcast.
    • "Segment 3" established the daily presence of a five-minute back-of-the-book feature on network newscasts. Although previously the TV networks had usually featured soft news at the end of their evening news, on some days the soft-news feature did not make it on the air because of the judged...1999, Bartholomew H. Sparrow, Uncertain Guardians: The News Media as a Political Institution, page 97
    • The change in the hard/soft news ratio has taken on several forms. In the print media, the change can be seen clearly by the expansion of "back of the book" sections, for example, about subjects as varied as science and gardening. Television has no formal back of the book, but there are now fewer...2004, Herbert J. Gans, Democracy and the News, page 29
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see back, book.

Questions about back of the book

What does back of the book mean?
Back of the book means less important or less hard-hitting material relegated to the later pages of a print publication or the later stages of a television broadcast.
What part of speech is back of the book?
Back of the book is a noun.

Words near back of the book in the dictionary

  1. back of beyond
  2. back of Godspeed
  3. back of house
  4. back of one's hand
  5. back of one's mind
  6. back of the book
  7. back of the net
  8. Back of the Wight
  9. back off
  10. back office
  11. back offices

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: back of the book (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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