Back-to-back

//ˌbæk.təˈbæk// adj, adv, noun, slang

adj, adv, noun, slang ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A house with a party wall at the rear.
  2. 2
    One of a pair of rig workers who are rostered on alternately.

    ""He's been standing-by in town for the last week, talk to his back-to-back on the rig in the morning." ("Back-to-back" is the man on the rig who does your job when you're not there."

Adjective
  1. 1
    Sequential or consecutive. not-comparable

    "Ruth and Gehrig hit back-to-back home runs."

  2. 2
    With one's back facing that of somebody else. not-comparable
  3. 3
    Emerging in exactly opposite directions. broadly, not-comparable

    "Seen in laboratory frame the photon-jet pair is not any longer back-to-back and the energy balance is distorted."

  4. 4
    Having a party wall at the rear. not-comparable

    "We lived in a row of back-to-back houses."

  5. 5
    Synonym of wired (“being a pair in seven card stud with one face up and one face down”). not-comparable, slang
Adjective
  1. 1
    one after the other wordnet
Adverb
  1. 1
    Alternative form of back to back. alt-of, alternative, not-comparable

    "A ScotRail Driver: [...] A good friend of mine overshot two stations back-to-back a couple of years ago. He tried to stop at one station and slid by it. Tried to stop at the next station. He slid by that, too."

Synonyms

All synonyms
consecutivewired

Example

More examples

"Yanni got two back-to-back life sentences for the murders."

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.