Meaning
Set aside for later, given reduced priority while more urgent matters are dealt with. The metaphor is kitchen physics: on a stove, the pots at the back simmer unattended while the cook's attention stays on the front, so whatever is on the back burner keeps warm but makes no progress. Neutral and extremely common in workplace speech; its polite function is to defer without killing - compare on ice or shelved, which sound more final. Regional use: General English; American kitchen origin.
Origin
The stovetop is the whole story: a pot parked at the back of the range cooks slowly, untended, while the action happens up front. The Phrase Finder notes that taking a metaphor from the stove is nothing new and that gas and electric cookers with a row of burners made the image obvious; the Oxford English Dictionary's first citation for the figurative use is dated 1963, from the American writer Robert C. Holloway. Wiktionary records the current definition - not immediate, inactive, receiving less than full attention - and lists on the front burner as its antonym, the position of whatever is being actively pushed. The phrase belongs to the great post-war family of domestic metaphors that office culture adopted wholesale.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- back burner
- on a back burner
- put on the back burner
Usage Examples
- The heritage-line restoration stayed on the back burner while the flood repairs consumed the budget.
- She kept the novel on the back burner for eleven years, one chapter a summer, until it was suddenly finished.
- Expansion plans went back on the burner the week the regulators opened their inquiry.