Dictionary

backslum en · NOUN

Etymology

From back + slum.

Meanings

1. A slum; the poor and disreputable portion of a town.
   • It is now about the foulest specimen extant of that kind of backslum or alley where, a generation back, according to Hood, pigs and Irish were wont to rally. 1875, Henry Sampson, A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times, page 392:
   • He was wrong there, for around the second next corner they ran into quite a different sort of landscape; a jumbled up place of city residences and back slums[.] 1936, Norman Lindsay, The Flyaway Highway, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page 30:

Forms