Other forms: murals
A mural is a picture painted straight onto a wall, big enough to take the whole thing. A gable end covered by a portrait three floors high; a school corridor painted as a jungle.
The wall is the canvas, so take the wall away and there is no mural — which is why people photograph murals and fight about them when a building comes down. The word covers old work too: the murals on Roman walls at Pompeii, the frescoes across a chapel ceiling, a fresco being a mural painted into wet plaster so the colour dries into the wall itself. Mural is also an adjective meaning 'of a wall' — mural painting, mural decoration — and that is where the word started. The painter is a muralist. A giant printed poster pasted up is not a mural; the paint has to go on the wall.
1nounmuralA large picture painted directly onto a wall or ceiling.
“A mural of the harbour covers the side of the fish market.”
2adjectivewallOf or on a wall.
“The museum has a room of mural paintings lifted from a Roman villa.”
mural is a painting.
A mural is, at bottom, a wall thing. English took mural from French, French had it from Latin muralis, and behind that stands murus, 'wall'. It arrived as an adjective for anything belonging to a wall, and the painting sense grew out of the phrase 'mural painting'.
Latin
muralis
French
mural
English, today
mural
Built from
Borrowed from French mural, from Latin muralis, from murus (“wall”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in In the City, Music, Art & Culture