Terminology question!

This is driving me a little batty especially with web searches.

What is the proper term for this?
Backend
Back End
or
Back-end?

I'm fairly certain it matters, since outside of this blog I've never seen so many learning resources!

Comments

[Chun Fei Lung]

It depends.

If you are talking about the actual thing it should be written as “back end” with a space, but when used as an adjective, it should be “back-end” with a hyphen:

“A back-end developer works on the back end of an application”.

However, words tend to lose their hyphens and spaces over time, so “back end” and “back-end” both slowly evolve into “backend”.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter that much in practice, because most people don’t really know (or care) about the difference. 🤷‍♂️