shieldwall
shieldwall is the alternative spelling of shield wall.
Meaning of shield wall
Noun
shield wall (plural shield walls)
- 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.
- A barrier.
- 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
Forms of shieldwall
| plural | shieldwalls |
|---|
Questions about shieldwall
- What is shieldwall the alternative spelling of?
- Shieldwall is the alternative spelling of shield wall.
Words near shieldwall in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: shieldwall (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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Cite this entry: “shieldwall.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shieldwall. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.