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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • At the time, Hong Kong, known mostly as a financial center and tourism hub, was pretty much a news backwater.
    — Jeff Stein, Washington Post, 1 July 2020
  • Frances McDormand stars as Fern, a widow who clung onto life in a Nevada backwater until the mine shut down, and with it the town.
    — David Morgan, CBS News, 25 Sep. 2020
  • The goal is to create more natural habitat in and around the lake, which is a backwater of the Mississippi River.
    — Shannon Prather, Star Tribune, 16 Feb. 2021
  • But while the location is so close to all of these destinations, the block itself is still somewhat of a backwater.
    — Diana Budds, Curbed, 12 Jan. 2021
  • Once a sleepy industrial backwater (the adjacency to the railroad was an asset), the place has changed with the times.
    — Jacques Kelly, baltimoresun.com, 12 Mar. 2022
  • In 1789, the United States was a tiny, poor, provincial backwater, of little interest to great powers of the day.
    — Ryan Cooper, The Week, 3 Nov. 2021
  • Other trout may be cruising, slurping their way along the length of a backwater or eddy, and then swimming back downstream to repeat the process.
    — John Merwin, Field & Stream, 23 June 2020
  • These days, Atlanta, once considered a hip-hop backwater, has become a Mecca for the genre.
    — Big Boi With Ted Scheinman, Smithsonian Magazine, 28 June 2023
  • Bald eagles nest in the hardwoods and dragonflies skim the backwater shallows.
    — Carson Vaughan, National Geographic, 21 Oct. 2020
  • Once a sleepy backwater of the industry, this segment has enjoyed a resurgence as the list of uses and customers has grown in recent years.
    — Liana Baker, BostonGlobe.com, 12 July 2020

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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