Word.ws English Dictionary

wayback

wayback noun: a very remote time or place. Also the alternative form of way back.

Noun

wayback (plural waybacks)

  1. (idiomatic) A very remote time or place.
    • Those who live in the “waybacks” should have better roads.1955, New Zealand. Parliament, Parliamentary Debates. House of Representatives
    • Films and radio have penetrated to the waybacks of New Zealand and to the Pacific Islands.1968, Ralph Herbert Brookes, Ian Hugh Kawharu, Administration in New Zealand's Multi-racial Society - Issue 13, page 76
  2. (idiomatic) An uneducated person from a remote area.
    • I saw fat men or boys, lean, awkward, baldheaded, asthmatic, rheumatic, waybacks and the last editions of the nursery, blowing at that light, when along would come some stray, solemn detachment of the human telegraph line, give a puff, clasp Liberty abover her head and whirl off in the full...1893, Robert Blair Risk, Observed and Noted, page 400
    • The farmers are not the class of thickheads and mossbacks and waybacks which the Government imagine them to be.1895, Official Reports of the Debates of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada
  3. (dated, informal) An area in the body of a car behind the rearseat, such as the back of a station wagon, storage well in a VW bug, etc.
    • Only, Mercury Villagers do not have waybacks. They have third seats, rear seats, or cargo areas, but not waybacks.2005, C.J. Hribal, The Company Car: A Novel, →ISBN, page 4
    • Two hours into the trip we discovered that Paul suffered from carsickness. Luckily, the wayback was equipped with built-in bins alongside the walls.2009, Gloria VanDemmeltraadt, Musing and Munching: A Memoir and Cookbook, →ISBN, page 43

Also used as

wayback is also the alternative form of way back.

Examples of wayback in a sentence

  • For the first time since beginning his macabre descent into the wayback, Eddie had no compulsion to follow his past.2009, Patrick Millikin, Phoenix Noir, →ISBN:
  • ...another on the sell-by date in the wayback where a living one looks out at maple elm and ash2018 Winter, Carol Ann Davis, “Another Darkness”, in Southern Review, volume 54, number 1, page 121:
  • There were also rumors of a lost love, a common Helium-3 miner who'd since disappeared somewhere in the wayback.2014, Homer Hickam, Crater Trueblood and the Lunar Rescue Company, →ISBN, page 1:
  • Unfortunately those who worked so hard for the fund did not realise the real needs of the waybacks or indeed of some settlers who are not considered waybacks.1913, Australasian Medical Gazette, page 239:

Forms of wayback

pluralwaybacks

Phrases with wayback

Questions about wayback

What does wayback mean?
Wayback means a very remote time or place.
How do you use wayback in a sentence?
For the first time since beginning his macabre descent into the wayback, Eddie had no compulsion to follow his past.
What part of speech is wayback?
Wayback is a noun.
What is the plural of wayback?
The plural of wayback is waybacks.

Words near wayback in the dictionary

  1. Wayanad bowtail
  2. wayang
  3. wayangs
  4. Wayao
  5. Wayatinah
  6. wayback
  7. wayback machine
  8. wayback machines
  9. waybacks
  10. waybeam
  11. waybeams

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wayback (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-wayback.wav.

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