ElanHasson.com

Commenter Joshua Blake wonders

why Word's status bar says "Word is preparing to background print
the document",
wondering whether there used to be other types of printing
like foreground.

Well, first of all,
this is a question about Office, something I explicitly deny
any special knowledge of:

Topics I am not inclined to cover: [...]

• Microsoft software that isn't Windows. (Exchange, Office, ...)
  

But I'm going to take this opportunity to teach you how to
use information already available to you to answer this question
yourself.

First, let's see what the Internet says about
Word and background printing.
A search for ‹Word background printing›
turns up pages that tell you

how to turn background printing on and off.
Well, that tells you right off the bat that there are other
types of printing,
and if you read the text of the page,
it even tells you what happens if you turn off background
printing:
You can't do anything with the program while it is printing.

There you go, an explanation of the other type of printing.