Word.ws English Dictionary

small of the back

small of the back noun: the relatively narrow, lumbar region of the back.

Noun

small of the back

  1. The relatively narrow, lumbar region of the back.
    • The plan was not feasible, for making a ninety-degree turn would have been impossible without nickel-alloy swivels inserted in the small of every man's back, and Lieutenant Scheisskopf was not sanguine at all about obtaining that many nickel-alloy swivels from Quartermaster or enlisting the...1961 November 10, Joseph Heller, “McWatt”, in Catch-22 […], New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, →OCLC, page 70
    • He remembered the smell of her skin in the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her fingers locked across the small of his back.1984, William Gibson, Neuromancer (Sprawl; book 1), New York, N.Y.: Ace Books, →ISBN, page 9

Synonyms of small of the back

Questions about small of the back

What does small of the back mean?
Small of the back means the relatively narrow, lumbar region of the back.
What part of speech is small of the back?
Small of the back is a noun.

Words near small of the back in the dictionary

  1. Small Münsterländer
  2. small nightshade
  3. small nightshades
  4. small nuclear ribonucleoprotein
  5. small nuclear ribonucleoproteins
  6. small of the back
  7. small or medium-sized enterprise
  8. small or medium-sized enterprises
  9. small packet
  10. Small Party of Good Boys
  11. small penis humiliation

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: small of the back (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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