back-to-back

1. not comparableSequential or consecutive.

   They sat through two back-to-back movies.

   3 more examples

   Ruth and Gehrig hit back-to-back home runs.

   So, of course, every time I came home from school, I would stay glued to the TV until Pokémon came on at five. The only problem was that my dad watched the news at 5:30, and Pokémon episodes were back-to-back, which meant I had to miss an episode every day, something I whined on and on about.

   2009 November 14, Camden Lamont, 1999, in Creepypasta, archived from the original on 21 Aug 2020

   An injury-time goal from Nikola Zigic against an obdurate Stoke side gave Birmingham back-to back Premier League wins for the first time in 14 months.

   2011 February 12, Les Roopanarine, “Birmingham 1 - 0 Stoke”, in BBC

2. not comparableWith one's back facing that of somebody else.
3. broadlynot comparablenatural sciencesEmerging in exactly opposite directions.

   In the rest frame of the #92;pi⁰ the photons emerge back-to-back isotropically.

   1992, David Shaw Brown, A Comparison of High Transverse Momentum Direct Photon and Neutral Pion Events in Negative Pion and Proton-nucleus Collisions at 31.5 GeV Center of Mass Energy

   3 more examples

   Seen in laboratory frame the photon-jet pair is not any longer back-to-back and the energy balance is distorted.

   2009, R. Fiore, Alessandro Papa, Igor Ivanov, Jacques Soffer, Diffraction 2008: International Workshop on Diffraction in High Energy Physics, Amer Inst of Physics

   This produces two back-to-back jets of hadrons that dominate the inclusive high energy cross-section.

   2000, S. Söldner-Rembold, Photon '99: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Structure and Interactions of the Photon, Including the 12th International Workshop on Photon-Photon Collisions, Freiburg, Germany, 23-27 May 1999

   Photons at leading order are produced back-to-back with an associated parton with nearly identical transverse momenta.

   2015, Thomas Schörner-Sadenius, The Large Hadron Collider: Harvest of Run 1, Springer, →ISBN, page 392

4. not comparableHaving a party wall at the rear.

   We lived in a row of back-to-back houses.

5. not comparableslangcard gamesSynonym of wired (“being a pair in seven card stud with one face up and one face down”).

   Synonyms: wired

1. alternativenot comparableAlternative form of back to back.

   There are five double-bogie A1A-A1A British-built diesel-electric locomotives, which are normally worked back-to-back under the control of a single driver.

   1960 April 28, H. P. White, “The Railways of Sierra Leone”, in Railway Magazine, page 284

   1 more example

   A ScotRail Driver: [...] A good friend of mine overshot two stations back-to-back a couple of years ago. He tried to stop at one station and slid by it. Tried to stop at the next station. He slid by that, too.

   2021 December 15, Paul Clifton, “There is nothing you can do”, in RAIL, number 946, page 37

plural back-to-backs

1. A house with a party wall at the rear.
2. oil industryOne of a pair of rig workers who are rostered on alternately.

   "He's been standing-by in town for the last week, talk to his back-to-back on the rig in the morning." ("Back-to-back" is the man on the rig who does your job when you're not there.

   2005, Paul Carter, Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, page 101