back story

British

noun

the events which take place before, and which help to bring about, the events portrayed in a film

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

For weeks the planet had been given a crash course in all things Ilia—his back story; his Olympic skater parents Roman and Tatiana; his precocious rise from the D.C. suburbs to the undisputed pinnacle of his sport.

From The Wall Street Journal

Whereas Batman had his tragic back story, making him moody and tortured, and Spider-Man had the youthful verve of a kid from Queens, Superman was always kind of a square.

From The Wall Street Journal

“Fallout,” meanwhile, has continued to impress as it’s delved into the tragic back story of Walton Goggins’ noseless Ghoul, aka Cooper Howard, and more deeply explored the moral morass of survival in a nuclear wasteland, along with humanity’s inevitably self-destructive desire for war.

From MarketWatch

The former MP also has a compelling back story.

From BBC

According to Matthiesen and his lawyer, Steven Schindler, the shock over the price tag is exactly why Newhouse and Landau both should have suspected something was fishy and done more to check its phony back story.

From The Wall Street Journal

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023