B2B

A business term that usually sits in front of the noun it sorts: B2B salespeople, B2B marketing. What it marks is the buyer. The customer is another company, so a B2B sale is one business selling to another. It can also stand alone as a label. Samanth Subramanian, writing in 2019, sums up warehouse shipments passing between firms with a bare "B2B." Unlike its back-to-back homograph, it rarely needs context to be recognized.

Behind the letters stands a phrase with several meanings. Back-to-back can mean one after another, as with concerts or games on consecutive nights. It can also mean standing spine to spine, houses sharing a party wall at the rear, or, in seven-card stud slang, a pair with one card up and one down. The same letters also spell the business-to-business term, so the surrounding words must show which reading applies. Like the full form, it takes no comparative.