Word.ws English Dictionary

brokeback

brokeback adjective: hunchbacked.

Adjective (1)

brokeback (not comparable)

  1. (rare) Hunchbacked.
    • Damn those brokeback tramps making a mess of our city.
    • ... his sickle-curved posture made him look as though his back were broken: a sad little brokeback dwarf crippled with age.1948, Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms, Part One, 1
  2. (rare) Broken; derelict.
    • The brokeback bridges in the hills sadden me: this place used to be beautiful.
    • There will be underground rivers, vast and wide, and huge cavernous killing zones with mist-wreathed stalagmite islands and waterfalls thundering into the subterranean depths — and stepping-stones and brokeback bridges to traverse under ...2007, Charles Stross, Halting State, →ISBN, page 134

Adjective (2)

brokeback (not comparable)

  1. (neologism, slang) Homoerotic; homosexual, gay.
    • I don't really think Frodo and Sam were gay, even if a couple of the scenes seemed a little brokeback to me.
    • You see, your words ain't worth no money, I ain't spoke back, bitch
      All of you niggas hang together on some Brokeback shit2023, “Talk'n That Shit!”, in Michael, performed by Killer Mike

Adjective (3) capitalized: Brokeback

Brokeback (not comparable)

  1. (alternative) Alternative spelling of brokeback in the homosexual sense.

Forms of brokeback

alternative formBrokeback

Origin of brokeback

From break + back; first used for "hunchback" in Carson McCullers' 1943 novella The Ballad of the Sad Café.

From the title of Annie Proulx's 1997 short story "Brokeback Mountain"; popularised by the 2005 film of the same name.

Words formed from brokeback

Phrases with brokeback

Questions about brokeback

What does brokeback mean?
Brokeback means hunchbacked.
What part of speech is brokeback?
Brokeback is an adjective.

Words near brokeback in the dictionary

  1. broke-ass
  2. broke-asses
  3. broke-down
  4. brokeass
  5. brokeasses
  6. brokeback
  7. brokeback marriage
  8. brokeback marriages
  9. broked
  10. brokedown
  11. brokefish

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: brokeback (page history and authors); Brokeback (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: En-au-brokeback.ogg.

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