Other forms: walls
A wall is one of the upright sides of a room or building. A brick wall, hang it on the wall, the garden wall.
Load-bearing walls carry weight from above and cannot simply be removed, which is the first question in any building work. Figuratively, a wall is any obstacle: hit a wall, a wall of silence. Note off the wall, meaning strange; up the wall, meaning driven mad; the writing on the wall, meaning a visible warning; and a fly on the wall, meaning an unseen observer.
1nounwallAn upright side of a room or building.
“We hung a picture of the family on the living room wall.”
2nounobstacleAn obstacle.
“They hit a wall at roughly the ninth attempt.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
wall is an upright barrier.
Old English weall comes from Latin vallum, a rampart, borrowed early — probably from the Roman frontier works the Anglo-Saxons found already standing. The word arrived with the ruins.
Middle English
wal
English, today
wall
Built from
From Middle English wal. From Middle English wal, from Old English weall (“wall, dike, earthwork, rampart, dam, rocky shore, cliff”), from Proto-West Germanic wall (“wall, rampart, entrenchment”), from Latin vallum (“wall, rampart, entrenchment, palisade”), from Proto-Indo-European welH- (“to turn, wind, roll”). Perhaps conflated with waw (“a wall within a house or dwelling, a room partition”), from Middle English wawe, from Old English wāg, wāh (“an interior wall, divider”), see waw.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA