See back forty on Wiktionary
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"etymology_text": "From back + forty, meaning “back side of a farm”. In the Homestead Acts (1860s–), farmers were granted a quarter section; a section was nominally 1 square mile containing 640 acres, a quarter section was 160 acres, and the quarter section was itself subdivided into four quarter-quarter sections of 40 acres each: two front forty and two back forty. Compare north forty, back of beyond, backcountry, and backwater.",
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"The remote part of a farm."
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"(US) The remote part of a farm."
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"The most remote or inaccessible part of any place."
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"(US, idiomatic) The most remote or inaccessible part of any place."
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Download raw JSONL data for back forty meaning in All languages combined (2.3kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-05-19 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-05-01 using wiktextract (c3cc510 and 1d3fdbf). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.