backward
His button-front white shirt, blue jeans, and leather shoes hardly seemed the picture of backwardness.
Instead of disparaging small farmers as a symbol of backwardness, we should value their knowledge and recognize modern industrial farms are unsustainable.
Lack of railway development matched the area’s comparative economic backwardness.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Crude and basic
101
at bottomidiom
backward
backwardly
bare
inelegant
inelegantly
low-tech
Mickey Mouse
over-simple
rough and readyidiom
roughly
roughness
rudely
rudeness
skeletal
skeletally
stone-age
two-dimensional
vanilla

backwardness | American Dictionary

backwardness
noun[ U ]
us/ˈbæk·wərd·nəs/
the state of not being developed, modern, or advanced:
The country must first overcome its backwardness and poverty.

Examples of backwardness

backwardness
He blamed official cor ruption, ignorance, and foreign intrigue for the backwardness of his homeland.
Such pottery does not represent cultural "backwardness" or a tradition separate from that of core areas.
He considers that miners have a history of educational backwardness, but this did not hinder progression at work.
Difficulties in auditory organization as a possible cause of reading backwardness.
Many saw themselves as the bearers of modernity, capable of stamping out backwardness.
Simultaneously, it distances the family from its archaic nativeness and its correlate ignorance and backwardness.
Difficulties in auditory organisation as a possible cause of reading backwardness.
The reasons he gave for the incident were lack of political education and sensitivity, barbarity and backwardness.
During the war, there emerged a greater awareness about avoiding the inclination to either romanticise rural life or condemn it for its alleged backwardness.
It is associated with backwardness and is widely used as an insult.
Family closeness, honour and shame, and even local dialects, are all considered to be signifiers of southern backwardness.
But it is also considered by many to be the language of backwardness, rurality, pover ty, and lack of social mobility.
The old colonial city was wrongly understood as a confusing medley of narrow and crooked streets and associated with backwardness and unhealthiness.
Our historical acceptance of moral and ethical backwardness as the norm has been at the expense of global social peace.
Of course, open-mindedness and willingness to learn from others is a prerequisite for realising this particular advantage of backwardness.
See all examples of backwardness
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.