underside

UK/ˈʌndəˌsaɪd/US/ˈʌndɚˌsaɪd/

nounB1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Other forms: undersides

The underside is the face of something that points at the ground. The underside of a leaf, the underside of a car.

It is a plain, useful word for a place you have to turn something over to see. A mechanic works on the underside of a chassis; a cook checks the underside of a pancake. Because the underside is the hidden half, writers borrow it for the hidden parts of life — the underside of a city, the underside of the tourist trade — though underbelly is the commoner choice there. Do not confuse it with underneath, which is a preposition rather than a thing.

Definitions of underside

1nounundersideThe bottom surface of something.B1
“Rust had eaten through the underside of the van.”
synonyms: belly

Where it comes from

From under- + side.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 11 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

underside in the wild

In a PGA, the package is square or rectangular, and the pins are arranged in a regular array on the underside of the package.
Pin grid array
A frenum piercing or frenulum piercing is a piercing of the penis shaft's underside.
Frenum piercing
On the underside of the cap there is usually a spongy surface with pores, instead of the gills typical of mushrooms.
Bolete
A soffit is an exterior architectural feature, generally the horizontal, aloft underside of the roof edge.
Soffit
Hopper cars are distinguished from gondola cars, which do not have opening doors on their underside or sides.
Hopper car

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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