Word.ws English Dictionary

marla

marla noun: plasticine; modelling clay.

Noun (1)

marla (uncountable)

  1. (Ireland) Plasticine; modelling clay.
    • Miss Carney handed us out blank paper and marla,
      old plasticine with the colours
      all rolled together into brown.1996, Thomas Kinsella, Model School, Inchicore: Collected Poems, 1956-1994, page 229
    • As she sits and plays with Damien, she feels her legs start to tremble from the effort. Her knees seem to disappear.
      Plasticine legs, she says to Damien. Old marla legs.1997, Catherine Dunne, In the Beginning, page 107

Noun (2)

marla (plural marlas)

  1. (Australia) A rufous hare-wallaby (Lagorchestes hirsutus), a small desert marsupial of Australia.

Noun (3)

marla (plural marlas)

  1. A unit of area used in the Indian subcontinent, of varying size, but roughly 250 square feet.

Proper noun capitalized: Marla

Marla

  1. A female given name from Hebrew.
    • Marla Rose, a 57-year-old Berwyn resident, told cops that after seeing an online Fuentes post “in regards to women’s rights” that declared, “Your body my choice,” she decided to “record a video” of Fuentes’s Berwyn property.2024 December 6, “Battery Charge For Racist Nick Fuentes”, in The Smoking Gun

Forms of marla

pluralmarlas
alternative formmala
alternative formmaala

Origin of marla

From Irish marla, from Middle English marle. Doublet of marl.

American back-formation from Marlene, first used in the 1930s.

Questions about marla

What does marla mean?
Marla means plasticine; modelling clay.
What part of speech is marla?
Marla can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of marla?
The plural of marla is marlas.

Words near marla in the dictionary

  1. markworthy
  2. Marky
  3. markèd
  4. markèdly
  5. marl
  6. marla
  7. marlaceous
  8. marlacious
  9. Marland
  10. Marlands
  11. Marlar

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: marla (page history and authors); Marla (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: “marla.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/marla. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.