These days before the examinations began were very difficult for everybody, and Perrin began that hideous “getting behind-hand” that made things accumulate so that there seemed no chance of ever catching up.

It was now the season for planting and sowing; many gardens and allotments of the villagers had already received their spring tillage; but the garden and the allotment of the Durbeyfields were behindhand.

It was churning day, and there was baking to be done, and the mending was behindhand, and the children needed clothes […]

I have constantly observed, that the generality of people are fifty years, at least, behind-hand in their politicks.

[The public] is so in awe of its own opinion, that it never dares to form any, but catches up the first idle rumour, lest it should be behind-hand in its judgment, and echoes it till it is deafened with the sound of its own voice.

Not long after the start Mr Bhosh was chagrined to discover that he was all behindhand, and he almost despaired of overtaking any of his fore-runners.

[…] Frl. Mayr is behind-hand with the rent.

1777, Samuel Johnson, Letter to James Boswell dated 25 November, 1777, cited in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, London: Charles Dilly, 1791, Volume 2, p. 178,
[…] I have had for some time a very difficult and laborious respiration, but I am better by purges, abstinence, and other methods. I am yet however much behind-hand in my health and rest.

He had enough of that faculty of small talk to be sufficiently eloquent upon insignificant topics; he could point a compliment, or envelope a double meaning with all the readiness of a practitioner in that commodious art, and indeed he was not behindhand with any man of modern honour in the true principles of the sect […]

And so literary an imagination as Blunden’s was of course not behindhand in recalling and applying Morris.

Behindhand

Meaning

Adj

Adv

Synonyms