Word.ws English Dictionary

backish

backish adjective: somewhat at the back.

Adjective

backish (not comparable)

  1. (informal) Somewhat at the back.
    • After the offer is graciously accepted (their arms are bitten off!), the unlikely Hollywood owners wisely take a back-ish seat to the darkly witty Wrexham folk, who love their team almost as much as they love slagging them off: “He puts in the shift, doesn’t he?” “So do the postmen. You wouldn’t...2022 August 28, Barbara Ellen, “The week in TV: House of the Dragon; The Accused: National Treasures on Trial; Welcome to Wrexham and more”, in The Guardian
  2. Somewhat or approximately back.
    • The value of the Latin letter O was for a virtual certainty a mid, back, rounded vowel. If therefore this letter is used to render a vowel in a previously unwritten (ancient) language, […] it is to be inferred that the phoneme in question was probably some kind of middish, backish, rounded vowel...2000, Andrew L. Sihler, Language History: An introduction, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, →ISBN, pages 196–197

Origin of backish

From back + -ish.

Questions about backish

What does backish mean?
Backish means somewhat at the back.
What part of speech is backish?
Backish is an adjective.

Words near backish in the dictionary

  1. backing tracks
  2. backing up
  3. backing up the truck
  4. backing water
  5. backings
  6. backish
  7. backite
  8. backjoint
  9. backjoints
  10. backjump
  11. backjumping

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: backish (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: “backish.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/backish. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.