Word.ws English Dictionary

shield walls

shield walls is the plural of shield wall.

Meaning of shield wall

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

Questions about shield walls

What is shield walls the plural of?
Shield walls is the plural of shield wall.

Words near shield walls in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shield walls (page history and authors); 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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