Backstep

noun, verb

noun, verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1
A step backwards
"There are also times when a player needs to enlist the aid of the backstep while on the baseline."
2
A regression. figuratively
"Up until now Almodovar has presented us with characters who are past the edge and flying over the abyss; for better or worse they have liberated themselves from the social structures and repressions of everyday life. […] Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown may feel as though it is a bit of a backstep for its director […] because it is examining the lives of the characters who have not broken very far from the everyday reality of accepted life."
3
An abrupt subsidence or change in deposition preserved in the sedimentary record due to a marine transgression.
4
Flow over a backward-facing step.
5
The process of going back and finishing a specification that was incomplete at the start of a process, once enough progress has been made to know the full details.
"With care it is possible to combine a median-of-three mechanism with partitioning that avoids backstep initialization."

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6
A platform at the rear of a firetruck where a firefighter can stand.
"Then, when I was a backstep firefighter in the early 1960s, a fire occurred in an old vacant movie theater on my day off."

Verb

1
To take a step backwards
2
To return to a previous place or time.
3
To retract or take back.
"Tony's smile departed his face and sadness became him. Pete began to backstep his words. He was filled with remorse over what he had asked the Corporal and was quick to reassure Tony that she was there, waiting."
4
To be arranged in steps going backwards.
"Le Vau is responsible for the jutting central core, while the wings that backstep so elegantly were designed Hardouin-Mansart."
5
To recede in an abrupt fashion due to marine transgression.
"As seen elsewhere in the North Sea, transgression continued in the Late Jurassic, causing shorelines to backstep, with coeval deposition of the Heno Formation clastics and Lola Formation claystones."

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6
To finish a specification that was initially incomplete once enough progress has been made to know all the details.
"Robust adaptive backstepping control algorithms are developed for state feedback tracking of a class of uncertain dynamic nonlinear systems preceded by unknown dead-zone nonlinearities, in the presence of bounded external disturbances."

"There are also times when a player needs to enlist the aid of the backstep while on the baseline."

From back + step.

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