wall
/wɔːl
/- The Washburn Valley is true Dales country, with stoutly-built stone barns and sinuous walls dividing up the fields of deep velvety green.
- The slow seep through the garden wall made the whole area under the grapes a muddy swamp.
- By the time I got to the drystone wall that divides the plot from the public footpath and the beck, the sobs had changed to screams of rage.
Synonyms
- Ayako didn't answer him back, but began to observe the surrounding buildings through the glass walls of the room.
- The room widens almost imperceptibly, then narrows again as the adobe walls converge on either side of the altar.
- Mirrors were on the right side of the wall, making the room appear much larger than it really was.
- At the strategic location of Pointe du Hoc, American Rangers scaled the cliff walls on D-Day.
- Up close, the walls were like the surface of the moon, made vertical.
- Describing the feeling of what it is like to scale a craggy wall with ease, Kirsty likened the experience to a Zen state.
- Detectives met a wall of silence despite being convinced that several local people knew who was responsible.
- Bullet-proof glass and protective walls will hopefully put paid to any terrorist attacks.
- He carried on his celestial observations alone from a tower situated on the protective wall of the cathedral.
Synonyms
- It was a clear foul - like when players ease a defender out the way in the wall at a free-kick.
- Nastja Ceh put Slovenia ahead in the 16th minute after curling a free-kick over a wall of defenders.
- Shevchenko steps up and promptly blasts the free-kick into the wall.
- The outer layer of the wall of the large intestine is weaker in some areas than in others.
- The outer wall of the braincase becomes the alisphenoid and the dermal skull bones.
- There were several points of adhesion from the lung to the chest wall and to the mediastinal pleura.
- They put these viewing platforms all over the place so that people can see into whatever area has been walled off.
- I thought the garden was walled all round, but there is a breach in the wall at the back which a healthy animal could have hurdled.
- Outside the garden is walled to the front with a cobble lock drive and pathway to the front door.
Synonyms
- I was once told that the mill was listed in the Domesday Book of 1086, and windows were walled up for the window tax of 1696.
- My room was far away from everybody else's, on the corner of an enclosed porch - it had once been open, but they walled it up.
- At the end of that time the slaves of one Adolius, to whom the inheritance of the mountain had descended, removed the stones with which the cavern had been walled up, and the seven sleepers were permitted to awake.
Synonyms
- They didn't touch me, but formed a solid formation that would be impossible to break, walling me in with the rail of the bridge at my back.
- This plus the fact the sheep pen is walled in on four sides by a solid board fence three and a half feet high on two sides and 15 feet on the other.
- When you should have been dreaming of accession, and lopping off the heads of people you took a dislike to, mad uncle Richard was walling you up in the tower.
Phrases
between you and me and the wall
drive someone up the wall
go to the wall
go up the wall
hit the wall
off the wall
walls have ears
wall-to-wall
Derivatives
wall-less
- When you were fielding in the wall-less labyrinth of cricketers and pitches, you often forgot which wicket your match was being played on.
- People are cooking, bathing, chatting in their wall-less homes.
- One double-walled track heads off north-west while another, wall-less, gently climbs a little east of north.
Origin
Old English, from Latin vallum 'rampart', from vallus 'stake'.
Wall comes from Latin vallum ‘rampart’, from vallus ‘stake’, which implies that the earliest walls were defensive ones around a town or camp. To go to the wall is now to fail commercially but originally meant ‘give way’ or ‘be beaten in a battle or fight’. The idea may be that of a hard-pressed fighter retreating until he had a wall behind him and he could retreat no more—until he had his back against the wall. There may also be a link to the proverb the weakest go to the wall, which dates back to the end of the 15th century, and is usually said to derive from the installation of seating round the walls in churches of the late Middle Ages. Someone who is off the wall is unconventional or crazy. This is a quite recent phrase, first recorded in the mid 1960s, in the USA. One suggestion is that it refers to the way that a ball sometimes bounces off a wall at an unexpected angle. The proverb walls have ears dates back to the early 17th century. A more rural version is fields have eyes, and woods have ears, which is first recorded some 400 years earlier. Saying that the writing is on the wall is a biblical allusion to the description of Belshazzar's feast in the Book of Daniel. In this account Belshazzar was the king of Babylon whose death was foretold by a mysterious hand which wrote on the palace wall at a banquet.
Rhymes
- green burial
- green butter
- green card
- green-carder
- green channel
- green charge
- green cheese
- green chemistry
- greenchop
- green circle
- Green Cloth
- green-coat
- green-coated
- green cod
- green-collar
- green consumerism
- green cormorant
- green corn
- green crab
- green crop
- green cross
- Green Cross Code
- green curry
- green curry paste
- green curtain