Word.ws English Dictionary

molly-guard

UK/ˈmɒli ɡɑːd/US/ˈmɑli ɡɑɹd/

molly-guard noun: a physical barrier to protect something from unwanted contact, especially a shield to prevent accidental tripping of an emergency shutdown or power switch.

Noun

molly-guard (plural molly-guards)

  1. A physical barrier to protect something from unwanted contact, especially a shield to prevent accidental tripping of an emergency shutdown or power switch.
    • There is a plastic molly-guard covering the escalator's shutdown button to prevent little kids from pushing it and stopping the escalator.
    • The radial heat losses are minimized by the Molly Guard foil which establishes a linear temperature profile between the hot heater housing and the water cooled base plate.1978, Proceedings of the 13th Intersociety Energy Conversion Engineering Conference, volume 3, Society of Automotive Engineers, page 1948

Forms of molly-guard

pluralmolly-guards

Origin of molly-guard

From Molly (female given name) + guard. Originally a Plexiglas cover improvised for the Big Red Switch on an IBM 4341 mainframe after a programmer's toddler daughter (named Molly) tripped it twice in one day. Later generalised to covers over stop/reset switches on disk drives and networking equipment.

Questions about molly-guard

What does molly-guard mean?
Molly-guard means a physical barrier to protect something from unwanted contact, especially a shield to prevent accidental tripping of an emergency shutdown or power switch.
What part of speech is molly-guard?
Molly-guard is a noun.
How do you pronounce molly-guard?
Molly-guard is pronounced /ˈmɒli ɡɑːd/ (UK).
What is the plural of molly-guard?
The plural of molly-guard is molly-guards.

Words near molly-guard in the dictionary

  1. Molly Mormon
  2. Molly Mormons
  3. molly wop
  4. molly-dooker
  5. molly-dookers
  6. molly-guard
  7. molly-guards
  8. molly-handed
  9. molly-house
  10. molly-houses
  11. molly-mawk

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: molly-guard (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: “molly-guard.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/molly-guard. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.