BACKWARD AND FORWARD

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does backward and forward mean? 

• BACKWARD AND FORWARD (adverb)
  The adverb BACKWARD AND FORWARD has 1 sense:

1. moving from one place to another and back again

  Familiarity information: BACKWARD AND FORWARD used as an adverb is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• BACKWARD AND FORWARD (adverb)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Moving from one place to another and back again

Synonyms:

back and forth; backward and forward; to and fro

Context example:

the old man just sat on the porch and rocked back and forth all day

 Context examples 

Holmes had stepped across, had lit the candle, and was passing it backward and forward across the window-panes.

(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

He threw himself down upon his face with his lens in his hand and crawled swiftly backward and forward, examining minutely the cracks between the boards.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

When the frog was got in, it hopped at once half the length of the boat, and then over my head, backward and forward, daubing my face and clothes with its odious slime.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

He began by drawing a most formidable-looking bludgeon loaded with lead from his pocket, and switching it backward and forward several times, as if to test its weight and strength.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Then the footsteps continued backward and forward, backward and forward, within a few yards of us.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

One thing specially surprised me, and that was, there were no journeyings backward and forward, no visits to Ingram Park: to be sure it was twenty miles off, on the borders of another county; but what was that distance to an ardent lover?

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

From under this great panoply she peeped up in a nervous, hesitating fashion at our windows, while her body oscillated backward and forward, and her fingers fidgeted with her glove buttons.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

He wrung his hands in an agony of apprehension, and swayed backward and forward in his chair.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

On the roof of my closet, not directly over the middle of the hammock, I ordered the joiner to cut out a hole of a foot square, to give me air in hot weather, as I slept; which hole I shut at pleasure with a board that drew backward and forward through a groove.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

I determined, therefore, that for the next few days I would always carry the case backward and forward with me, so that it might never be really out of my reach.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)