See shield wall in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"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."
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"(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."
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"A barrier."
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"(puristic, otherwise archaic) A barrier."
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"ref": "1999, Seamus Heaney, “Introduction”, in Beowulf, London: Faber and Faber, page xii:",
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"An impenetrable barrier."
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"(figuratively) An impenetrable barrier."
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"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."
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"An impenetrable barrier."
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"word": "shield wall"
}
Download raw JSONL data for shield wall meaning in English (3.1kB)
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"path": [
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"section": "English",
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"title": "shield wall",
"trace": ""
}
{
"called_from": "form_descriptions/1831",
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"path": [
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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 2025-11-27 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-11-20 using wiktextract (5887622 and c6a903f). 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.