Backcheck
noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The act of backchecking.
"That was a great backcheck, Gordie."
- 1 To check (an opposing player) while skating toward or near one's own goal. transitive
"Any time you've got a guy who can score 63 goals, let him, and find someone else to backcheck."
- 2 To engage in checking while skating toward or near one's own goal. intransitive
"2004, Bruce Driver, Clare Wharton, The Baffled Parent's Guide to Coaching Youth Hockey, page 81: A smart defensive player knows when to backcheck the puck carrier and when to backcheck to cover an open player. Hockey has no greater test of your heart and intensity than your willingness to backcheck, particularly at the end of a sustained attack when the other team has suddenly come up with the puck and you are feeling exhausted."
- 3 To check someone else's work after they have completed it, in a backward-looking type of review or audit, especially one that runs on a backchannel workflow in parallel with the main workflow (and thus is not a rate-determining or throughput-bottlenecking step).
Example
More examples"Any time you've got a guy who can score 63 goals, let him, and find someone else to backcheck."
Etymology
From back + check.
More for "backcheck"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.