back-alley
adjective
dirty, unprepossessing, sordid, or clandestine.
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back-alley
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back alley
back alleysee under back street.
back-alley
American
[bak-al-ee]
/ ˈbækˈæl i /
adjective
back alley
Idioms
Etymology
Origin of back-alley
An Americanism dating back to 1860–65
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Eric Baker and Jeff Fluhr founded StubHub in 2000 on a simple premise: buying secondhand tickets shouldn’t feel like a back-alley shakedown.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 11, 2026
She’s on the wrong side of 50, has been fired from her retro-style exercise show and is so desperate that she’s considering submitting to a back-alley rejuvenation regime.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 6, 2024
In this country, before abortion was legal, women went to both reputable doctors and back-alley quacks to get care.
From Slate ● Nov. 7, 2023
As a result, the illicit abortions that were once invisible — the back-alley abortions before Roe v.
From New York Times ● Dec. 8, 2022
At the university, just a few miles from his back-alley boardinghouse on Invalidenstrasse, Mendel began to experience the intellectual baptism that he had so ardently sought in Brno.
From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The back-and-forth fosters confusion but also distrust, she said: "It further perpetuates the myth of like, the sketchy abortion doctor in the back alley."
From Barron's ● May 10, 2026
“We can play a defensive game if we have to. And I think we can play a back alley game, too.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 13, 2025
Shawn Younker, incarcerated in Pennsylvania, writes, “We might as well be rummaging the dusty old leftovers in some thrift store or back alley dumpster.”
From Slate ● Sep. 17, 2024
The students had planned to meet that day after classes in a back alley less than 300 feet from the campus, he said.
From New York Times ● Nov. 15, 2023
I mean, suddenly he was that little kid tearing down a back alley with some housewife hanging wash and shouting, “Look at ’im scoot!”
From "Crash" by Jerry Spinelli
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
