1 [onlybeforenoun] directed or moving towards the back:
She strode past him without a backward glance.
2 moving in a direction that means that no progress is being made
SYNRETROGRADE:
She felt that going back to live in her home town would be a backward step.
3 having made less progress than normal; developing slowly:
a backward part of the country, with no paved roads and no electricity * a backward child * (BrE, spoken) She's not backward in coming forward (= she's not shy).
compareFORWARD
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for backward is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is backward a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, backward is tagged as adjective.
Does backward appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — backward appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.