background noise

1. 1.

   extraneous noise contaminating sound measurements that cannot be separated from the desired signal

   Synonymsground noise

   Broaderbackground

   Narrowersurface noise

Questions about background noise

What does background noise mean?

background noise means "extraneous noise contaminating sound measurements that cannot be separated from the desired signal".

What is another word for background noise?

Close synonyms include ground noise. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is background noise a common word?

background noise is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.