Word.ws English Dictionary

backslum

backslum noun: a slum; the poor and disreputable portion of a town.

Noun

backslum (plural backslums)

  1. A slum; the poor and disreputable portion of a town.
    • It is now about the foulest specimen extant of that kind of backslum or alley where, a generation back, according to Hood, pigs and Irish were wont to rally.1875, Henry Sampson, A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times, page 392
    • He was wrong there, for around the second next corner they ran into quite a different sort of landscape; a jumbled up place of city residences and back slums[.]1936, Norman Lindsay, The Flyaway Highway, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page 30

Forms of backslum

pluralbackslums

Origin of backslum

From back + slum.

Questions about backslum

What does backslum mean?
Backslum means a slum; the poor and disreputable portion of a town.
What part of speech is backslum?
Backslum is a noun.
What is the plural of backslum?
The plural of backslum is backslums.

Words near backslum in the dictionary

  1. backslideth
  2. backsliding
  3. backslidings
  4. backslope
  5. backslopes
  6. backslum
  7. backslums
  8. backsold
  9. backsolution
  10. backsolutions
  11. backsolvable

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: backslum (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:

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