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Backpacking (travel)
Backpacking (travel): budget independent tourism with a backpack, hostels, and long flexible itineraries; roots in the German youth hostel movement (1907–1933), mainstreamed via the gap year, distinct from wilderness backpacking.
Backronym
Backronym (bacronym): a phrase invented after the fact so its initial letters spell an existing word, coined 1983 in the Washington Post; covers mnemonics like Apgar and false etymologies like posh from "port out, starboard home."
Backslash
Backslash (\), officially REVERSE SOLIDUS, U+005C: mirror of the slash, used in Windows file paths (C:\path, \\server\share), as escape character in string literals, in TeX macros, and as surrogate for the set-minus operator; little used before 1961.
Backus–Naur form
Backus-Naur form (BNF, Backus normal form), created by John Backus in 1959 and applied to ALGOL 60 by Peter Naur, is a production-rule notation for context-free grammars; extended as EBNF and ABNF (RFC 5234, STD 68) for Internet specifications.
Backward design
Backward design, sometimes called understanding by design, is a curriculum planning method that sets learning goals and assessments before teaching activities, introduced by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in 1998.
Backward integration
Backward integration is a form of vertical integration in which a firm moves upstream to own the inputs it buys, aiming to cut costs and secure supply.
Backwardation
Backwardation is the condition of a futures market in which the price for later delivery is below the spot price, the opposite of contango; it typically signals a tight physical market.
Bacon Brothers (gangsters)
The Bacon brothers, Jonathan, Jarrod, and Jamie, were Abbotsford, British Columbia gangsters linked by police to the Red Scorpions; Jonathan was killed in Kelowna in 2011, Jarrod imprisoned for a cocaine conspiracy, and Jamie convicted in the Surrey Six murders.
Bacon's Rebellion
Bacon's Rebellion (1676–1677), a Virginia uprising led by Nathaniel Bacon Jr. against Governor Sir William Berkeley, began as frontier Indian fighting, became a civil war, burned Jamestown, and ended with Bacon's death and 23 hangings.
Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex
The Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex, or Oxus Civilization, is a Bronze Age culture of oasis settlements in Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, dating from about 2250 to 1500 BC.
Bad Blood (TV series)
Bad Blood (2017–2018) is a Canadian crime drama created by Simon Barry and Michael Konyves, based on Business or Blood, dramatizing Montreal's Rizzuto mafia family; two seasons, 14 episodes, starring Anthony LaPaglia and Kim Coates on Citytv and Netflix.
Bad Boy Mowers
Bad Boy Mowers is an American manufacturer of zero-turn mowers, tractors, and UTVs based in Batesville, Arkansas, owned by private equity firms the Sterling Group and TorQuest Partners.
Bad Dürrenberg burial
Bad Dürrenberg burial, or grave of the shaman of Bad Dürrenberg (Schamanin von Bad Dürrenberg): a ~7000–6800 BCE Mesolithic double burial of a woman and infant in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, with antler regalia, ochre, and a skull-base anomaly.
Bad faith
Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is Jean-Paul Sartre's concept from Being and Nothingness (1943) for self-deception: denying one's freedom by treating oneself as a fixed thing, opposed to authenticity.
Bad faith (existentialism)
Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is Sartre's existentialist concept of self-deception, denying either facticity or transcendence, introduced in Being and Nothingness (1943) and central to authenticity, his Freud critique, and anti-racist writings.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is a 2009 American crime film directed by Werner Herzog and starring Nicolas Cage as a corrupt, drug-addicted New Orleans police lieutenant.
Bada Rajan
Bada Rajan (Rajan Mahadev Nair), Mumbai underworld don of Tilak Nagar, Chembur; ran cinema ticket black-marketing and hafta rackets, mentored Chhota Rajan, allied with Dawood Ibrahim, and was shot dead outside Esplanade Court in 1983.
Bada'i al-zuhur fi waqa'i al-duhur
Bada'i al-zuhur fi waqa'i al-duhur (بدائع الزهور في وقائع الدهور) is a chronicle of Egyptian history by Ibn Iyas, covering Egypt to the Ottoman conquest of 1517.
Badagas
Badagas, the dominant agricultural community of the Nilgiri Hills, Tamil Nadu; speak Badaga (badagu), a Kannada-descended Dravidian language; migrated from Mysore around 1600; long counted among the Nilgiri tribes but not listed as a Scheduled Tribe.
Badan Chandra Borphukan
Badan Chandra Borphukan (বদনচন্দ্ৰ বৰফুকন) was the Ahom viceroy of Gauhati, in charge of Lower Assam, who in 1817 brought a Burmese army into Assam and was murdered in 1818.
Bādarāyaṇa
Bādarāyaṇa (बादरायण) is the name tradition gives to the author of the Brahma Sūtra, the Vedānta text systematizing the Upaniṣads, on which Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and Madhva wrote rival commentaries.
Badarian culture
The Badarian culture, also known as the Badari culture, was a predynastic culture of Upper Egypt, the oldest known farming tradition in the Nile Valley, dating to about 4400–4000 BC.
Baddeley's model of working memory
Baddeley's model of working memory, proposed by Baddeley and Hitch in 1974 and revised in 2000, is a multicomponent theory comprising a central executive, phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and episodic buffer, contrasted with Cowan's embedded-processes model.
Badeni crisis
The Badeni crisis was an 1897 political confrontation in Cisleithania, the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy, triggered by language ordinances making Czech equal to German in administration.
Badeni language ordinances
The Badeni language ordinances were 1897 decrees by Count Kasimir Felix Badeni making Czech equal to German as an official language in Bohemia and Moravia, repealed in 1899.
Badenoch shadow cabinet
Badenoch shadow cabinet: Conservative opposition front bench under Kemi Badenoch, Leader of the Opposition since 2 November 2024; formed 5 November 2024, reshuffled July 2025 and August 2026, with Andrew Griffith as shadow chancellor and Tom Tugendhat as shadow foreign secretary.
Bader Ataya
Bader Ataya is a UAE-based technology entrepreneur who co-founded Dubai's cloud-kitchen company Kitopi in January 2018, serving as Chief Growth Officer, and earlier co-founded Mumzworld.com.
Badge
Badge: an emblem signifying membership, rank, achievement, or identity, from medieval livery and regimental insignia to police shields and digital Open Badges (1EdTech, W3C Verifiable Credentials) used as micro-credentials in education.
Badge Man
Badge Man is an alleged figure seen in Mary Moorman's 1963 Dealey Plaza Polaroid behind the grassy knoll fence, named by Gary Mack and Jack White; photogrammetric studies by Crawley and Myers concluded it was not a feasible human shooter position.
Badge of Military Merit
Badge of Military Merit, the Purple Heart's predecessor, was a purple heart-shaped cloth decoration created by George Washington on August 7, 1782, at Newburgh, New York, honoring enlisted men for meritorious action; only three Revolutionary War recipients are verified.