background definition

1. a person's social heritage: previous experience or training
• examples: he is a lawyer with a sports background
2. the part of a scene (or picture) that lies behind objects in the foreground
• examples: he posed her against a background of rolling hills
3. information that is essential to understanding a situation or problem
• examples: the embassy filled him in on the background of the incident
4. extraneous signals that can be confused with the phenomenon to be observed or measured
• examples: they got a bad connection and could hardly hear one another over the background signals
5. relatively unimportant or inconspicuous accompanying situation
• examples: when the rain came he could hear the sound of thunder in the background
6. (computer science) the area of the screen in graphical user interfaces against which icons and windows appear
7. understate the importance or quality of
• examples: he played down his royal ancestry