<p>This paper investigates the problem of dynamic event-triggered control for a class of large-scale nonlinear systems. In particular, both neutral delays and unknown backlash-like hysteresis are considered. This requires to integrate a compensation mechanism into the event-triggered control architecture. To this end, dynamic gain and adaptive control techniques are introduced to address the effects of neutral delays, unknown hysteresis and parameter uncertainties simultaneously. By introducing a non-negative internal dynamic variable, a dynamic event-triggered controller is designed using the hyperbolic tangent function to reduce the communication burden. By means of the Lyapunov–Krasovskii method, it is demonstrated that all signals of the closed-loop system are globally bounded and eventually converge to a tunable bounded region. Moreover, the Zeno behavior is avoided. Finally, a simulation example is presented to verify the validity of the control scheme.</p>