Word.ws English Dictionary

backburner

backburner is the alternative form 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

Verb

backburner (third-person singular simple present backburners, present participle backburnering, simple past and past participle backburnered)

  1. (idiomatic, informal, transitive) To relegate to a lower priority.
    • "What I noticed was that my sadness and loneliness got backburnered," she told the BBC.2013, Lorna Stewart, BBC News, Love letters and kindness may improve mental health

Forms of backburner

Noun
pluralbackburners
Verb
third-person singular presentbackburners
present participlebackburnering
past participlebackburnered
pastbackburnered

Origin of backburner

From back + burner.

Questions about backburner

What does backburner mean?
Backburner means to relegate to a lower priority.
What is backburner the alternative form of?
Backburner is the alternative form of back burner.
What part of speech is backburner?
Backburner is a verb.
What is the past tense of backburner?
The past tense of backburner is backburnered.

Words near backburner in the dictionary

  1. backbriefs
  2. backbulge
  3. backbulges
  4. backburn
  5. backburned
  6. backburner
  7. backburnered
  8. backburnering
  9. backburners
  10. backburning
  11. backburns

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: backburner (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-backburner.wav.

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