backslum

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English

Etymology

From back +‎ slum.

Noun

backslum (plural backslums)

  1. A slum; the poor and disreputable portion of a town.
    • 1875, Henry Sampson, A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times, page 392:
      It is now about the foulest specimen extant of that kind of backslum or alley where, a generation back, according to Hood, pigs and Irish were wont to rally.
    • 1936, Norman Lindsay, The Flyaway Highway, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page 30:
      He was wrong there, for around the second next corner they ran into quite a different sort of landscape; a jumbled up place of city residences and back slums[.]

References

  • John Camden Hotten (1873) The Slang Dictionary