Wiktionary
n. (alternative spelling of backwater English)
Usage examples of "back-water".
The village is a hateful little back-water, and its few inhabitants no better than idiots.
Potato peels and chicken feathers were bobbing in the river’s back-waters, and he caught whiffs of yeast on the breeze.
Sometimes they were just babbling, each to his own, but many times they came together in dim choruses that swelled, clashed, merged, and collapsed, like waves of a tide probing and seeking its way through the mazy back-waters of an estuary.
He kept to the banks, poking with a stick among the sandy bays and caves and little back-waters, myself always close on his heels.
How different from his tiny back-water hamlet the great German port cities must have seemed, how vast the ocean, how strange the lofty skyscrapers and endless hub-bub of his new land.
It liked that no better than the other shocks this wretched back-water system had given it.
Even as Farnholme peered through the heavy rain, he could see the flurry of white foam as someone in the sternsheets gave an order and the oars dug into the sea, back-watering strongly until the boat came to a stop and lay silently, without moving, a half-seen blur in the darkness.