backstreet
backstreet adjective: associated with neighborhoods on back streets, often in older neighborhoods, with poorer residents. Also the alternative spelling of back street.
Adjective
backstreet (comparative more backstreet, superlative most backstreet)
- Associated with neighborhoods on back streets, often in older neighborhoods, with poorer residents.
- The agency was given to some deserving politician who, as he knew nothing at all about Indians and spoke no language except traces of back-street American, would not be prejudiced in Indian affairs and interfere with the highly informed traders.1949, Sinclair Lewis, chapter 18, in The God-Seeker, New York: Popular Library, page 94
- She's been living in her uptown world / I bet she's never had a backstreet guy / I bet her momma never told her why1983, “Uptown Girl”, in Billy Joel (music), An Innocent Man
- Done in poor and unsanitary conditions, secretly and illegally; back-alley.
- The results of self-induced and backstreet abortions come to our hospitals for the damage to be put right.1965 June 15, Renée Short, Hansard
Also used as
backstreet is also the alternative spelling of back street.
Forms of backstreet
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| comparative | more backstreet |
| superlative | most backstreet |
| alternative form | back-street |
| Noun | |
| plural | backstreets |
Origin of backstreet
From back + street.
Questions about backstreet
- What does backstreet mean?
- Backstreet means associated with neighborhoods on back streets, often in older neighborhoods, with poorer residents.
- What part of speech is backstreet?
- Backstreet is an adjective.
Words near backstreet in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: backstreet (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: “backstreet.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/backstreet. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.