Word.ws English Dictionary

balls-to-the-wall

balls-to-the-wall is the alternative form of balls to the wall.

Meaning of balls to the wall

Adverb

balls to the wall (not comparable)

  1. (US, idiomatic, slang) With maximum effort or commitment.
    • I told the staff...the day before the hurricane struck that I expected them to cut every piece of red tape, do everything they could, that it was balls to the wall, that I didn't want to hear anybody say that we couldn't do anything—to do everything they humanly could to respond.2006, Michael D. Brown, Testimony before the US Senate Homeland Security Committee
    Synonyms:
    all out
  2. (US, idiomatic, slang) Full throttle; (at) maximum speed.

Questions about balls-to-the-wall

What is balls-to-the-wall the alternative form of?
Balls-to-the-wall is the alternative form of balls to the wall.

Words near balls-to-the-wall in the dictionary

  1. balls to the wall
  2. balls to the walls
  3. balls up
  4. balls-deep
  5. balls-out
  6. balls-to-the-wall
  7. balls-to-the-walls
  8. balls-up
  9. balls-ups
  10. ballsac
  11. ballsache

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: balls-to-the-wall (page history and authors); balls to the wall (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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