Word.ws English Dictionary

shield wall

shield wall noun: a defensive formation, used from antiquity through the early Middle Ages, in which soldiers stand shoulder to shoulder with their shields overlapping, creating a continuous barrier against enemy attack.

Noun

shield wall (plural shield walls)

  1. (historical) A defensive formation, used from antiquity through the early Middle Ages, in which soldiers stand shoulder to shoulder with their shields overlapping, creating a continuous barrier against enemy attack.
  2. (otherwise archaic) A barrier.
  3. (figuratively) An impenetrable barrier.
    • Still, in spite of the sensation of being caught between a ‘shield-wall’ of opaque references and a ‘word-hoard’ that is old and strange, such readers are also bound to feel a certain ‘shock of the new’.1999, Seamus Heaney, “Introduction”, in Beowulf, London: Faber and Faber, page xii
    • Their spears protruded from the chinks in this formation that was known as the ‘shieldwall’ or ‘war hedge’.1999, Robert Lacey, Danny Danziger, The Year 1000: What life was like at the turn of The First Millennium, London: Abacus, published 2000, page 154

Forms of shield wall

pluralshield walls
alternative formshieldwall
alternative formshield-wall

Origin of shield wall

See Old English sċieldweall, with the same meaning.

Questions about shield wall

What does shield wall mean?
Shield wall means a defensive formation, used from antiquity through the early Middle Ages, in which soldiers stand shoulder to shoulder with their shields overlapping, creating a continuous barrier against enemy attack.
What part of speech is shield wall?
Shield wall is a noun.
What is the plural of shield wall?
The plural of shield wall is shield walls.

Words near shield wall in the dictionary

  1. Shield Row
  2. shield shrimp
  3. shield volcano
  4. shield volcanoes
  5. shield volcanos
  6. shield wall
  7. shield walls
  8. shield-backed bug
  9. shield-backed bugs
  10. shield-bearer
  11. shield-bearers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shield 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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