Outback

How to spell outback

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce outback

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does outback mean?

1. nounThe remote, sparsely inhabited interior regions of Australia.
2. adjectiveRelating to or located in the remote interior; remote and rural.

Outback in a sentence

• noun

  The documentary followed a family running cattle deep in the outback.

• adjective

  The pilot delivered medical supplies to an outback station hundreds of miles from any hospital.

• noun

  Travelling across the outback requires extra fuel and plenty of water.

• adjective

  They spent a week at an outback lodge with no phone signal at all.

Where does outback come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound formed from the everyday words 'out' and 'back', both of which descend from Old English: 'ut' meaning 'outward' or 'away', and 'baec' meaning 'the rear part'. The phrase grew up in Australian English in the second half of the 1800s, originally written as the separate words 'out back' to describe land lying out and back from the settled coastal towns, that is, the sparsely populated interior. Over time the two words fused into a single noun, 'the outback', for the vast remote inland country. Because each half of the word is so familiar, the only real spelling care is remembering it is written solid as one word rather than as two; there is no hidden letter or foreign root to trip over.

How the word is built

• out- (away from a central point)
• back (the rear or distant part)