Back Story's Back Story

[Ronald_C.Semone]

I have long been interested in obscure words or phrases which suddenly become popular, hang around awhile, and then (usually) die out. A good example is the word “oxymoron” which until a few years ago was only known to and used by literary scholars to refer to one particular type of figure of speech. Now rarely a day or two goes by that I don’t see it used in the newspaper (usually, I might add, with, depending on your point of view, a new meaning or an incorrect meaning). Which brings us to the phrase “back story.” I do not recall ever hearing this word before last Fall when it was frequently used in discussions of the TV hit “Lost.” Since then I have seen it constantly in a wide variety of contexts. In yesterday’s newspaper, for example, four different writers used it! The phrase does not appear in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, so I assume it is of fairly recent creation. Can anyone provide a cite for the phrase antedating “Lost”?

[Colibri]

It’s more than 20 years older than Lost. Originally it seems to have been a screenwriter’s term that has gained increasing currency recently.

Back story’s story: From humble Hollywood start to vogue word

It began quietly in the early 1980s, probably among writers creating series for television. The Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) earliest citation is from an AP dispatch by Jerry Buck in 1982 about the screenwriters Stephen and Elinor Karpf: “They had been compiling characters and back stories for a prospective serial for several years.” The OED recently noted that the term’s early specific meaning was a history “created for a fictional character or situation, especially in a film or television series.”