back-up
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
7 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
Wiktionary
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "back-up", 7-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "back-up" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "back-up" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
back up is aEnglishverb. It means: To move backwards, especially for a vehicle to do so.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | back up |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 7 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for back up is 7 letters long, classified as averb. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 12 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for back up in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is back up, spelled B-A-C-K- -U-P, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1To move backwards, especially for a vehicle to do so.
- 2To move a vehicle backwards.
- 3To undo one's actions.
- 4To reconsider one's thoughts.
- 5To copy (data) so that it can be restored if the main copy is lost.
- 6To provide support or the promise of support to.
- 7For the non-striker to take a few steps down the pitch, in preparation to taking a run, just as the bowler bowls the ball.
- 8For a fielder to position himself behind the wicket (relative to a team-mate who is throwing the ball at the wicket) so as to stop the ball, and prevent overthrows.
- 9To halt the flow or movement of something.
- 10To fill up because of a backlog.
- 11To run a printing press in reverse.
- 12If a property backs up to another property, that means it abuts or shares a border with another property.
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter B in our English index: