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Dictionary definition for: Background
1. (n) a person''s social heritage: previous experience or training; "he is a lawyer with a sports background"
2. (v) understate the importance or quality of; "he played down his royal ancestry"
3. (n) the part of a scene (or picture) that lies behind objects in the foreground; "he posed her against a background of rolling hills"
4. (n) information that is essential to understanding a situation or problem; "the embassy filled him in on the background of the incident"
5. (n) 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"
6. (n) relatively unimportant or inconspicuous accompanying situation; "when the rain came he could hear the sound of thunder in the background"
7. (n) the state of the environment in which a situation exists; "you can''t do that in a university setting"
8. (n) (computer science) the area of the screen in graphical user interfaces against which icons and windows appear
WordNet 2.1 Copyright Princeton University. All rights reserved.
