wall

1. An upright structure of masonry, wood, plaster, or other building material serving to enclose, divide, or protect an area, especially a vertical construction forming an inner partition or exterior siding of a building.
2. A continuous structure of masonry or other material forming a rampart and built for defensive purposes. Often used in the plural.
3. A structure of stonework, cement, or other material built to retain a flow of water.
4. 1. Something resembling a wall in appearance, function, or construction, as the exterior surface of a body organ or part: the abdominal wall.
   2. Something resembling a wall in impenetrability or strength: a wall of silence; a wall of fog.
   3. An extreme or desperate condition or position, such as defeat or ruin: driven to the wall by poverty.
5. Sports. The vertical surface of an ocean wave in surfing.

1. To enclose, surround, or fortify with or as if with a wall: wall up an old window. See synonyms at enclose.
2. To divide or separate with or as if with a wall. Often used with off: wall off half a room.
3. To confine or seal behind a wall; immure: "I determined to wall [the body] up in the cellar" (Edgar Allan Poe).
4. To block or close (an opening or passage, for example) with or as if with a wall.

off the wall Slang.

1. Extremely unconventional.
2. Without foundation; ridiculous: an accusation that is really off the wall.

1. Into a state of extreme frustration, anger, or distress: tensions that are driving me up the wall.

1. An ominous indication of the course of future events: saw the writing on the wall and fled the country.

[Middle English, from Old English weall, from Latin vallum, palisade, from vallus, stake.]

For more information on wall, visit Britannica.com.

noun

1. A solid structure that encloses an area or separates one area from another: barrier, partition. See include/exclude, thing.
2. Something that impedes or prevents entry or passage: bar, barricade, barrier, block, blockage, clog, hamper, hindrance, hurdle, impediment, obstacle, obstruction, snag, stop, traverse. See help/harm/harmless, open/close.

verb

1. To separate with or as if with a wall: fence, partition. See include/exclude.
2. To confine within a limited area. cage, coop (in or up), enclose, fence (in), immure, mew (up), pen², shut in, shut up. See free/unfree.
3. To shut in with or as if with bars: bar, confine, lock. See free/unfree.

Idioms beginning with wall:
wallop
walls have ears, the

See also back to the wall; beat one's head against the wall; between you and me and the lamppost (four walls); climb the walls; drive someone crazy (up the wall); fly on the wall; go to the wall; handwriting on the wall; hole in the wall; off the wall; run into a stone wall.

[WPI]

1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone: “Wall??”

2. A request for further explication. Compare octal forty.

3. [Unix, from ‘write all’] v. To send a message to everyone currently logged in, esp. with the wall(8) utility.

It is said that sense 1 came from the idiom ‘like talking to a blank wall’. It was originally used in situations where, after you had carefully answered a question, the questioner stared at you blankly, clearly having understood nothing that was explained. You would then throw out a “Hello, wall?” to elicit some sort of response from the questioner. Later, confused questioners began voicing “Wall?” themselves.

The outside layer of material surrounding an object or space; a paries.

1. A structure which serves to enclose or subdivide a building, usually presenting a continuous surface except where penetrated by doors, windows, and the like.
2. A rampart.
3. A retaining wall. For specific types, see battered wall, bearing wall, blank wall, blind wall, boarded wall, board wall breakaway wall, cavity wall, common wall, composite wall, counterwall, curtain wall, dead wall, dry wall, dry-stacked surface-bonded wall, fire wall, gable-end wall, hollow wall, load-bearing wall, masonry-bonded hollow wall, mud wall, non-load-bearing wall, partition, party wall, retaining wall, serpentine wall, spandrel wall, springing wall, street wall, structural wall, sustaining wall, veneered wall.

A structure bounding or limiting a space or a definitive mass of material.

• abdominal w. — see abdominal wall.
• cell w. — a rigid structure that lies just outside of and is joined to the plasma membrane of plant cells and most prokaryotic cells, which protects the cell and maintains its shape.
• w. chart — see calendar charts, shed sheet.
• intestinal w. — composed of serosa, muscular tunic, the submucosa containing intestinal submucosal glands, and the mucosa of lining cells, goblet and enterochromaffin cells.

Dreaming about a wall could be about our defensiveness, or a dream wall could represent a sense of security. The term "wall" is also central to many idioms, and the dream could be drawing on the meaning of one of these, such as: the "writing on the wall," "off the wall," our "back against the wall," "talking to a brick wall," or "hitting one's head against the wall."

This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2009)

For other uses, see Wall (disambiguation).

A brick wall

A wall is a usually solid structure that defines and sometimes protects an area. Most commonly, a wall delineates a building and supports its superstructure, separates space in buildings into rooms, or protects or delineates a space in the open air. There are three principal types of structural walls: building walls, exterior boundary walls, and retaining walls.

Contents 1 Building walls 2 Boundary walls 3 Separation walls 4 Retaining walls 5 Shared walls 6 Portable walls 7 Etymology 8 Walls in popular culture 9 See also 10 External links

Building walls

Building walls have one main purpose: to support roofs and ceilings. Such walls most often have three or more separate components. In today's construction, a building's wall will usually have the structural elements (such as 2×4 studs in a house wall), insulation, and finish elements, or surface (such as drywall or panelling). In addition, the wall may house various types of electrical wiring or plumbing. Electrical outlets are usually mounted in walls.

Building walls frequently become works of art externally and internally, such as when featuring mosaic work or when murals are painted on them; or as design foci when they exhibit textures or painted finishes for effect.

On a ship, the walls separating compartments are termed "bulkheads", whilst the thinner walls separating cabins are termed "partitions".

In architecture and civil engineering, the term curtain wall refers to the facade of a building which is not load-bearing but functions as decoration, finish, front, face, or history preservation.

Mossy wall

Boundary walls

Stone wall of an English barn

Boundary walls include privacy walls, boundary-marking walls on property, and city walls. These intergrade into fences; the conventional differentiation is that a fence is of minimal thickness and often is open in nature, while a wall is usually more than a nominal thickness and is completely closed, or opaque. More to the point, if an exterior structure is made of wood or wire, it is generally referred to as a fence, while if it is made of masonry, it is considered a wall. A common term for both is barrier, convenient if it is partly a wall and partly a fence, for example the Berlin Wall. Another kind of wall/fence ambiguity is the ha-ha which is set below ground level, so as not to interrupt a view yet acting as a barrier to cattle for example.

An old Italian wall surrounded by flowers

Before the invention of artillery, many of the world's cities and towns, particularly in Europe and Asia, had protective walls (also called town walls or city walls). In fact, the English word "wall" is derived from Latin vallum, which was a type of fortification wall. Since they are no longer relevant for defense, such cities have grown beyond their walls, and many of the walls, or portions thereof, have been torn down, for example in Rome, Italy and in Beijing, China. Examples of protective walls on a much larger scale include the Great Wall of China and Hadrian's Wall.

Separation walls

Main article: Separation barrier

Some walls are designed to formally separate one population from another. A example was the Berlin Wall, which divided East and West Berlin.

Retaining walls

Dry-stone wall - Grendon

Ashlar wall - Inca wall at Machu Picchu, Peru

In areas of rocky soils around the world, farmers have often pulled large quantities of stone out of their fields to make farming easier, and have stacked those stones to make walls that either mark the field boundary, or the property boundary, or both.

Retaining walls are a special type of wall, that may be either external to a building or part of a building, that serves to provide a barrier to the movement of earth, stone or water. The ground surface or water on one side of a retaining wall will be noticeably higher than on the other side. A dike is one type of retaining wall, as is a levee, a load-bearing foundation wall, and a sea wall.

Shared walls

Special laws often govern walls shared by neighbouring properties. Typically, one neighbour cannot alter the common wall if it is likely to affect the building or property on the other side. A wall may also separate apartment or hotel walls from each other. Each wall has two sides and breaking a wall on one side will break the wall on the other side.

Portable walls

Portable walls, such as room dividers or portable partitions, are used to take a large open space and effectively divide it into smaller rooms. Portable walls can be static such as cubicle walls, or they can be wall panels mounted on casters to provide an easy way to reconfigure assembly space. They are often found inside schools, churches, convention centers, hotels, and corporate facilities.

Etymology

It is notable that English uses the same word to refer to an external wall, and the internal sides of a room. This is by no means universal, and many languages distinguish between the two. In German, some of this distinction can be seen between Wand and Mauer, in Spanish between Pared and Muro.

Walls in popular culture

In culture a wall normally means a barrier stopping progress or entry. For instance the progressive/psychedelic rock band Pink Floyd have a concept album called The Wall. This Wall is not real, but a metaphor for social barring. American poet laureate Robert Frost describes a pointless rock wall as a metaphor for the myopia of the culture-bound in his poem Mending Wall. The Berlin Wall that separated the Soviet zone of Berlin, Germany from the rest of the city from 1961 until its ultimate destruction in 1989 was often refered to just as 'The Wall'.

Another common usage is as a communal surface to write upon. For instance the social networking site Facebook uses a wall to log the scrawls of friends. Users have gone on to create more advanced versions of the original wall, such as the application SuperWall.

See also

• List of walls
• Ashlar
• Curtain wall
• Dry-stone wall
• Fence
• Load-bearing wall
• Sleeper wall
• Stone wall
• Wallpaper

External links

Look up wall in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Walls

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - væg, mur, dæmning, dige, vold
v. tr. - befæste, omgive med mur, tilmure, mure inde

idioms:

• drive up the wall    køre en ud i tovene, hidse en op
• go to the wall    vige, tabe, blive skubbet til side, bukke under
• go up the wall    blive tosset, blive rasende
• send up the wall    gøre en person sur
• wall cupboard    vægskab
• Wall Street    Wall Street; det amerikanske finanscentrum

Nederlands (Dutch)
muur, wand, zijkant, ommuren

Français (French)
n. - (gén, Constr, Archit) mur, paroi, (Anat, Bot) paroi, (Aut) flanc, (fig) mur
v. tr. - entourer/protéger d'un mur, boucher par un mur

idioms:

• drive someone up the wall    exaspérer (qn), rendre fou/folle
• go to the wall    faire faillite
• go up the wall    devenir dingue
• wall cupboard    élément (mural)

idioms:

• wall Street    Wall Street

Deutsch (German)
n. - Mauer, Wand, Wall
v. - mit einer Mauer umgeben, vermauern

idioms:

• drive someone up the wall    verrückt machen
• go to the wall    an die Wand gedrückt werden
• go up the wall    die Wände hochgehen
• wall cupboard    Wandschrank

idioms:

• wall Street    Wall Street, am. Geld- und Kapitalmarkt, am. Hochfinanz

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - τοίχος, τείχος, τοίχωμα
v. - προστατεύω με τείχος, περιτειχίζω, χωρίζω με τοίχο, εντοιχίζω, κλείνω με τοίχο

idioms:

• drive up the wall    εξοργίζω, κάνω έξω φρενών
• go to the wall    χρεοκοπώ, φαλίρω
• go up the wall    γίνομαι έξω φρενών
• send up the wall    εξοργίζω, κάνω έξω φρενών
• wall cupboard    εντοιχισμένο ντουλάπι
• Wall Street    η Γουόλ Στριτ, το οικονομικό κέντρο της Ν. Υόρκης

Italiano (Italian)
muro, muraglia, circondare di mura

idioms:

• backs to the wall    spalle al muro
• drive up the wall    fare innervosire, rendere furioso, far perdere le staffe
• go to the wall    fallire
• go up the wall    perder la testa
• off the wall    fuori di testa, imprevedibile, strano, non appropriato
• send up the wall    far impazzire qualcuno, far dare di testa
• Wall Street    Wall Street, la Borsa di New York

Português (Portuguese)
n. - parede (f), muro (m)
v. - cercar, emparedar

idioms:

• backs to the wall    estar sem saber o que fazer
• drive up the wall    deixar louco
• go to the wall    perder a partida
• go up the wall    ser sacrificado, falir
• off the wall    extremamente não convencional
• send up the wall    deixar muito agoniado
• Wall Street    rua em Nova Iorque em centro financeiro

Русский (Russian)
стена, ограда, дамба, барьер, шпалера, защита, стенка, стенной, настенный, шпалерный, обносить стеной, разделять стеной, варить соль, закатывать глаза

idioms:

• backs to the wall    безвыходное положение, отбиваясь от наседающих врагов
• drive up the wall    доводить до бешенства
• go to the wall    потерпеть неудачу, обанкротиться, бать "припертым к стенке"
• go up the wall    обезуметь, "полезть на стенку"
• off the wall    необычный, непривычный, сумасшедший
• send up the wall    приводить в ярость, изводить
• Wall Street    Уолл-стрит - улица, на которой находится биржа в Нью-Йорке, американский финансовый капитал

Español (Spanish)
n. - muro, pared, tapia, muralla
v. tr. - emparedar, tapiar, cercar, amurallar

idioms:

• drive someone up the wall    sacar de quicio, enervar, poner (a otro) entre la espada y la pared, obligar a ceder, vencer, aplastar.
• go to the wall    fracasar, arruinarse, verse acosado
• go up the wall    ponerse furioso
• wall cupboard    armario empotrado/embutido
• Wall Street    centro financiero de Nueva York

idioms:

• for wall Street    de Wall Street

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - vägg, mur
v. - omge med murar

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
墙, 垣, 墙壁, 禁闭, 围住

idioms:

• drive up the wall    逼某人至绝境, 使...大怒
• go to the wall    失败
• go up the wall    情绪激动
• send up the wall    使人极为恼怒
• wall cupboard    吊柜
• Wall Street    华尔街

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 牆, 垣, 牆壁
v. tr. - 禁閉, 圍住

idioms:

• drive up the wall    逼某人至絕境, 使...大怒
• go to the wall    失敗
• go up the wall    情緒激動
• send up the wall    使人極為惱怒
• wall cupboard    吊櫃
• Wall Street    華爾街

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 벽, 성벽, 장애
v. tr. - 담으로 에워싸다, 벽으로 막다, (벽 속에) 가두다

idioms:

• drive up the wall    머리끝까지 화나게 하다
• go to the wall    궁지에 빠지다, 밀려나다, 굴복하다
• go up the wall    발끈 화를 내다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 壁, 塀, 城壁, 内側, 壁状のもの, 障壁
v. - 壁で囲む, 壁でふさぐ

idioms:

• backs to the wall    窮地に陥って
• dry-stone wall    モルタル等を使わず石を積み重ねた壁
• go to the wall    窮地に陥る, 負ける
• go up the wall    ひどくいらいらする
• off the wall    とっぴな
• retaining wall    擁壁
• Wailing Wall    嘆きの壁, 心の悩みをいやす場
• wall cupboard    壁戸棚
• Wall Street    ウォール街, 米国金融市場

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) حائط, جدار, سور, جانب (فعل) يسور, يحوط, يحيط, يحصن, يسد‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮קיר, כותל, חומה, דופן, הצד התלול של הר, סלע המקיף עורק או מרבץ במכרה‬
v. tr. - ‮הקיף בחומה, גדר בגדר, סתם, אטם (פתח)‬
wall Street - ‮וול-סטריט (מרכז העסקים והבורסה בניו-יורק)‬

If you are unable to view some languages clearly, click here.

To select your translation preferences click here.