Other forms: brickworks
Brickwork is the laid bricks of a wall, and the pattern they are laid in. Fine brickwork, repair the brickwork, Victorian brickwork.
The pattern has a name of its own, so English bond and Flemish bond describe how the bricks overlap for strength. Crumbling mortar rather than the bricks themselves is usually what makes old brickwork fail.
1nounbrickworkThe pattern in which bricks have been laid.
“The surveyor found a crack in the brickwork above the door.”
brickwork is a structure.
Proto-West Germanic
*brekan — to break
Middle Dutch
bricke
Middle English
brik
English
brick
English, today
brickwork
From brick + -work. brick comes from Late Middle English brik, bryke, bricke, from Middle Low German - and Middle Dutch bricke "cracked or broken brick; tile-stone"; modern Dutch brik, ultimately related to Proto-West Germanic brekan (“to break”), whence also Old French briche and French brique (“brick”). Compare also German Low German Brickje (“small board, tray”). Related to break. The social media slang sense derives from memes about building up one's feed “brick by brick”, analogizing bricks with reels that inform the algorithm. The sense of a helpful, reliable person comes from Lycurgus referring to the army as the walls of Sparta, every man a brick.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA