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

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.

Last updated:

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