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say it: BAK-grownd
background is a noun and verb meaning "a person's social heritage: previous experience or training". It carries 9 recorded senses.
a person's social heritage: previous experience or training
“he is a lawyer with a sports background”
information that is essential to understanding a situation or problem
“the embassy filled him in on the background of the incident”
extraneous signals that can be confused with the phenomenon to be observed or measured
“they got a bad connection and could hardly hear one another over the background signals”
relatively unimportant or inconspicuous accompanying situation
“when the rain came he could hear the sound of thunder in the background”
the state of the environment in which a situation exists
“you can't do that in a university setting”
(computer science) the area of the screen in graphical user interfaces against which icons and windows appear
computer science
understate the importance or quality of
“he played down his royal ancestry”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for background come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.