Word.ws English Dictionary

behind the curve

behind the curve prepositional phrase: out of date.

Prepositional phrase

  1. Out of date.
    • But in his 1996 novel, Holy Fire, [Bruce] Sterling imagines a rather different future: a world ruled by an all-powerful gerontocracy, which appropriates most of the world's wealth to pay for ever more costly life-extension techniques. […] When the novel first came out, it seemed that Sterling was...1997 March 9, Paul Krugman, “Does Getting Old Cost Society Too Much?”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
    • Toyota used to be a company with foresight, always ready to take action, but now they have fallen very far behind the curve.2010 February 4, Alan Ohnsman with Yuki Hagiwara, “Toyota Plans Media Blitz as Stock Loses $21 Billion”, in BusinessWeek
  2. (US) Not making the progress required.

Antonyms of behind the curve

Questions about behind the curve

What does behind the curve mean?
Behind the curve means out of date.
What part of speech is behind the curve?
Behind the curve is a prepositional phrase.

Words near behind the curve in the dictionary

  1. behind the 8-ball
  2. behind the arc
  3. behind the bit
  4. behind the counter
  5. behind the curtain
  6. behind the curve
  7. behind the ear
  8. behind the eight ball
  9. behind the eight-ball
  10. behind the eightball
  11. behind the scene

Source and license

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