Word.ws English Dictionary

balls to the wall

balls to the wall adverb: with maximum effort or commitment.

balls to the wall: with maximum effort or commitment
Image: Bin im Garten, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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
    • “I always go balls to the wall,” founding Ape Gordon Goner tells Rolling Stone over Zoom.2021 November 1, Samantha Hissong, quoting Gordon Goner, “How Four NFT Novices Created a Billion-Dollar Ecosystem of Cartoon Apes”, in Rolling Stone
    Synonyms:
    all out
  2. (US, idiomatic, slang) Full throttle; (at) maximum speed.

Synonyms of balls to the wall

Forms of balls to the wall

alternative formballs-to-the-wall
alternative formballs to the walls
alternative formballs-to-the-walls

Origin of balls to the wall

First attested in the 1960s in the context of aviation, in reference to ball-shaped grips on an aircraft's engine controls (typically throttle, prop pitch and fuel mixture). Pushing these "balls to the wall" would put the aircraft at maximum thrust. Analogous to pedal to the metal. Not related to the term balls-out, which refers to a ball governor on a steam engine. Neither balls-out nor balls to the wall is connected with the vulgar sense of balls (“testicles”) except via folk etymology.

Questions about balls to the wall

What does balls to the wall mean?
Balls to the wall means with maximum effort or commitment.
What part of speech is balls to the wall?
Balls to the wall is an adverb.

Words near balls to the wall in the dictionary

  1. balls of steel
  2. balls of the thumb
  3. balls off
  4. balls on
  5. balls out
  6. balls to the wall
  7. balls to the walls
  8. balls up
  9. balls-deep
  10. balls-out
  11. balls-to-the-wall

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: 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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-balls to the wall.ogg.

Cite this entry: “balls to the wall.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/balls_to_the_wall. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.