Mid 17th century (in sense 3): probably a shortening of pall-mall. sense 2 derives from The Mall, a tree-bordered walk in St James's Park, London, formerly the site of a pall-mall alley. sense 1 dates from the 1960s.

• The game pall-mall was popular in the 17th century. Players used a mallet to drive a boxwood ball through an iron ring suspended at the end of a long alley, itself also called a pall-mall. The game got its name, via French, from the Italian for ‘ball’ and ‘mallet’. Pall Mall, a street in central London known for its large number of private clubs and formerly a fashionable place to promenade, was originally a pall-mall for the game. From the 18th century other sheltered places for walking came to be called malls—the first reference to a mall for shopping dates from 1950 in the USA. Malleable (Late Middle English) got its name from the same source as mall, for it originally meant ‘able to be hammered’ and goes back, like mallet (Late Middle English) and maul (Middle English), to Latin malleus ‘hammer’.