Word.ws English Dictionary

balls-to-the-walls

balls-to-the-walls 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-walls

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

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

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: balls-to-the-walls (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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