little evolved from or characteristic of an earlier ancestral type; "archaic forms of life"; "primitive mammals"; "the okapi is a short-necked primitive cousin of the giraffe"
(computer science) the area of the screen in graphical user interfaces against which icons and windows appear
a person's social heritage: previous experience or training; "he is a lawyer with a sports background"
information that is essential to understanding a situation or problem; "the embassy filled him in on the background of the incident"
the part of a scene (or picture) that lies behind objects in the foreground; "he posed her against a background of rolling hills"
relatively unimportant or inconspicuous accompanying situation; "when the rain came he could hear the sound of thunder in the background"
extraneous signals that can be confused with the phenomenon to be observed or measured; "they got a bad connection and could hardly hear one another over the background signals"
understate the importance or quality of; "he played down his royal ancestry"
separate or apart in time; "distant events"; "the remote past or future"
separated in space or coming from or going to a distance; "distant villages"; "the sound of distant traffic"; "a distant sound"; "a distant telephone call"
far apart in relevance or relationship; "a distant cousin"; "a distant likeness"
a card game using a pack of cards from which one queen has been removed; players match cards and the player holding the unmatched queen at the end of the game is the loser (or `old maid')
strikingly strange or unusual; "an exotic hair style"; "protons, neutrons, electrons and all their exotic variants"; "the exotic landscape of a dead planet"