side by side

1. 1.

   nearest in space or position; immediately adjoining without intervening space

   “had adjacent rooms”

   “in the next room”

   “the person sitting next to me”

   “our rooms were side by side”

   Synonymsadjacentnext

   Similarclose
2. 2.

   closely related or associated

   “a city in which communism and democracy had to live side by side”

   Similarrelated

Questions about side by side

What does side by side mean?

side by side means "nearest in space or position; immediately adjoining without intervening space". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

What is another word for side by side?

Close synonyms include adjacent, next. 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 side by side a common word?

side by side is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.