See fourth wall in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
Download JSON data for fourth wall meaning in English (7.0kB)
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"etymology_text": "A reference to the three walls of a box set, with the fourth wall being the imaginary wall separating the performers from the audience. Coined by philosopher and art critic Denis Didérot in 1758 and thus a calque of French quatrième mur.",
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"_dis1": "96 4",
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"ref": "1916 February 20, “Second Thoughts on First Nights”, in New York Times, page X7",
"text": "This is a flat, unnecessary, and strangely disturbing denial of the fourth-wall convention, that unwritten agreement between playwright and playgoer whereby you think of yourself at the theatre as a privileged, exonerated, comfortably seated eavesdropper.",
"type": "quotation"
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{
"ref": "2005 August 31, Philip Kennicott, “Our Aura of Security, Shattered Like Glass”, in Washington Post, page C01",
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"The imaginary invisible wall at the front of the stage in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play."
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"(performing arts, idiomatic) The imaginary invisible wall at the front of the stage in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play."
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"_dis1": "89 11",
"word": "fourth-wall"
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"word": "neljäs seinä"
},
{
"_dis1": "93 7",
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"sense": "imaginary invisible wall in theatre",
"word": "მეოთხე კედელი"
},
{
"_dis1": "93 7",
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"sense": "imaginary invisible wall in theatre",
"tags": [
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"word": "vierte Wand"
},
{
"_dis1": "93 7",
"code": "tr",
"lang": "Turkish",
"sense": "imaginary invisible wall in theatre",
"word": "dördüncü duvar"
}
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"ref": "1999, Orson Scott Card, (Please provide the book title or journal name)",
"text": "Even though you, the author, may be maintaining a fourth wall between your characters and your readers, he, the narrator, is not keeping that fourth wall between himself and the audience he thinks he's telling the story to.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2003, Robert Keith Sawyer, Improvised Dialogues: Emergence and Creativity in Conversation, page 107",
"text": "The fourth wall is the imaginary barrier between the stage and the audience, and the phrase is a metaphor for the dramatic frame.",
"type": "quotation"
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{
"ref": "2003, Cathy Haase, Acting for Film, page 92",
"text": "As actors, we are still looking out into the imaginary fourth wall. The difference is that in film, the fourth wall is no longer fixed;",
"type": "quotation"
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{
"ref": "2004, Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them, page 207",
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"type": "quotation"
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"(by extension) The boundary between the fiction and the audience."
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},
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"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2005 August 31, Philip Kennicott, “Our Aura of Security, Shattered Like Glass”, in Washington Post, page C01",
"text": "There's been a convention in the theater world to think of the division between audience and spectacle as a fourth wall, a wall that the playwright tries to eliminate through the force of his drama.",
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},
{
"ref": "2003, Robert Keith Sawyer, Improvised Dialogues: Emergence and Creativity in Conversation, page 107",
"text": "The fourth wall is the imaginary barrier between the stage and the audience, and the phrase is a metaphor for the dramatic frame.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2003, Cathy Haase, Acting for Film, page 92",
"text": "As actors, we are still looking out into the imaginary fourth wall. The difference is that in film, the fourth wall is no longer fixed;",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2004, Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them, page 207",
"text": "... removes the fourth wall of the nineteenth-century novel and, in doing so, eliminates the border between a fictional inside and a nonfictional outside.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2005, Chris Crawford, Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, page 208",
"text": "I've saved the worst for last. The crudest scheme is to drop the fourth wall and advise players as to actions that are inhibiting",
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"synonyms": [
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"word": "fourth-wall"
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"word": "4th wall"
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"translations": [
{
"code": "nl",
"lang": "Dutch",
"sense": "imaginary invisible wall in theatre",
"tags": [
"masculine"
],
"word": "vierde wand"
},
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"sense": "imaginary invisible wall in theatre",
"word": "neljäs seinä"
},
{
"code": "ka",
"lang": "Georgian",
"roman": "meotxe ḳedeli",
"sense": "imaginary invisible wall in theatre",
"word": "მეოთხე კედელი"
},
{
"code": "de",
"lang": "German",
"sense": "imaginary invisible wall in theatre",
"tags": [
"feminine"
],
"word": "vierte Wand"
},
{
"code": "tr",
"lang": "Turkish",
"sense": "imaginary invisible wall in theatre",
"word": "dördüncü duvar"
},
{
"code": "nl",
"lang": "Dutch",
"sense": "boundary between fiction and audience",
"tags": [
"masculine"
],
"word": "vierde wand"
},
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"sense": "boundary between fiction and audience",
"word": "neljäs seinä"
},
{
"code": "fr",
"lang": "French",
"sense": "boundary between fiction and audience",
"tags": [
"masculine"
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"word": "quatrième mur"
},
{
"code": "ka",
"lang": "Georgian",
"roman": "meotxe ḳedeli",
"sense": "boundary between fiction and audience",
"word": "მეოთხე კედელი"
},
{
"code": "de",
"lang": "German",
"sense": "boundary between fiction and audience",
"tags": [
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"word": "vierte Wand"
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"code": "ja",
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"roman": "daishi no kabe, daiyon no kabe",
"sense": "boundary between fiction and audience",
"word": "第四の壁"
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"sense": "boundary between fiction and audience",
"tags": [
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"word": "czwarta ściana"
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"tags": [
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"word": "quarta dimensão"
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"sense": "boundary between fiction and audience",
"word": "dördüncü duvar"
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.