How to Use backwater in a Sentence

backwater

noun
Definition of backwaternext
Synonyms for backwaternext
  • The once sleepy backwater is now a thriving city.
  • This is Las Vegas, not some backwater town where the game is the whole thing.
    — oregonlive, 12 Dec. 2022
  • The fish put a deep bend in her plug rod and fought doggedly in the backwater slough off the Ohio River in West Virginia.
    — Bob McNally, Outdoor Life, 21 Mar. 2024
  • My favorite meal ever would have to be in the backwaters of Kerala on a house boat.
    — Cnt Editors, CNT, 8 Mar. 2017
  • Elsewhere, the fury seems aimed at the accident of his own birth in backwater Spain.
    — Jackson Arn, The New Yorker, 18 Dec. 2023
  • The Senate, no longer a fount of ideas, became a backwater of the U.S. government.
    — Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 11 Aug. 2021
  • This is the end result: from a backwater to the semifinals of Euro 2020.
    — New York Times, 5 July 2021
  • Reagan, Bush, and Trump made the U.S. a fiscal backwater.
    — Timothy Noah, The New Republic, 8 June 2023
  • The Park Service also doused the backwater with a fish-killing poison.
    — WIRED, 4 Nov. 2023
  • But in 2005 this backwater bank incurred the wrath and might of the world’s financial hegemon.
    — The Economist, 19 May 2018
  • Woe betide a beetle or a grasshopper perched on a leaf above the backwaters where these fish lurk.
    — Jonathan Balcombe, Scientific American, 1 May 2017
  • Later when Spain withdrew from the area, Fort Adams became a backwater in every sense of the word.
    — Peter Kujawinski, New York Times, 13 Oct. 2017
  • Of course, the perception is that this market is a backwater.
    — Tom Taulli, Forbes, 3 Sep. 2021
  • Coming from Seoul, even Portland must have seemed like a backwater to her...
    — oregonlive, 26 Apr. 2021
  • And when there's more water in the river, those backwaters are flushing faster.
    — Taylor Wilson, USA TODAY, 8 Mar. 2023
  • The year is 1963 and the city is Saigon, still a humid backwater but about to become the red-hot center of a geopolitical firestorm.
    — Jennifer Reese, New York Times, 20 Feb. 2020
  • The city may have been a relative backwater in the mid 19th century.
    — Mark Feeney, BostonGlobe.com, 19 Apr. 2023
  • And some Utah fans are holding out that the Pac is preferable to those backwater schools in the Big 12, and that the devouring could and should feast at the other end of the table.
    — Gordon Monson, The Salt Lake Tribune, 28 July 2022
  • The area used to be a lot of things, mostly neglected, an urban backwater.
    — Carl Nolte, SFChronicle.com, 28 Sep. 2019
  • It was long viewed within the government as a sleepy backwater.
    — New York Times, 25 May 2021
  • The state now largely exists in popular culture as a backwater; the butt of jokes.
    — Jason Linkins, The New Republic, 23 Oct. 2021
  • Over the next three years, Iran emerged from a digital backwater into one of the most prolific cyber armies in the world.
    — New York Times, 4 Feb. 2021
  • Who would expect the next phase of that renaissance to bud in backwaters such as Sewanee, Tenn., and Milledgeville, Ga.?
    — Stephen Mirarchi, National Review, 28 Dec. 2019
  • But the Utes already have mined a whole lot of talent out of the backwaters in that footprint, especially Texas.
    — Gordon Monson, The Salt Lake Tribune, 3 Aug. 2023
  • After the Cold War, the Lop Nur test site ended its large blasts and became a relative backwater.
    — William J. Broad, New York Times, 20 Dec. 2023
  • But the job brought him face to face with the bleakness of daily life, especially in the backwater rural corners of the country.
    — David E. Hoffman, Washington Post, 30 Aug. 2022
  • In just a matter of decades, their nation has gone from an impoverished backwater to one of the wealthiest in the world.
    — Ben Westcott, CNN, 2 Oct. 2019
  • The first person ever to hear that Jesus is the Son of God was a low-income teenage girl in an obscure backwater of the Roman empire.
    — Rebecca McLaughlin, WSJ, 23 Dec. 2022
  • To me, the backwaters permeate every aspect of life at the hotel, from the best rooms to book, which have the most panoramic views, to the food at Keraleeyam, the hotel’s primary restaurant.
    — Prasad Ramamurthy, Travel + Leisure, 15 Sep. 2024
  • But even so, the portrayal of Pioneertown as a backwater strip of desert nobody had heard of seemed a little far-fetched.
    — Rebecca Ellis, Los Angeles Times, 11 Sep. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'backwater.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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