walled

1. 1
   adjective

   Surrounded or enclosed by a wall.

   The walled courtyard offered the only quiet spot in the busy estate.

   Tourists wandered the narrow lanes of the old walled town for hours.

   Similarenclosed, fortified

   Oppositeopen

   Note

   An absolute adjective: a garden is walled or it is not, so it takes neither more nor very. It sits naturally before nouns for enclosed places, such as a walled garden or a walled town, and it carries into history writing too, as in Ralph D. Sawyer's Ancient Chinese Warfare (2011), with its "early walled site at Hsi-shan."

2. 2
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of wall.

   Engineers walled up the collapsed tunnel for safety.

   The monks walled the garden against the bitter winter winds.

   Note

   One spelling does double duty. It is the past tense in "the monks walled the garden" and the participle in "the garden was walled." The passive is where it shades into the adjective. Not every walled is about masonry, though. The verb behind it can also mean to boil, to well up like spring water, or to tie a wall knot in a rope. In gamers' slang it means to use a wallhack.

3. 3
   adjective

   Set into or sealed within a wall; immured.

   Workers uncovered a walled reliquary built into the chapel's east face.

   The walled prisoner had been left to die behind the cellar's masonry.

   Similarimmured, sealed

   Note

   Here the wall does not surround the thing but swallows it: a reliquary set into masonry, a prisoner sealed behind it. Because the same word also means enclosed by a wall, a phrase like a walled chamber can point either way, and only context decides. When the meaning must be unmistakable, immured or walled up says it plainly.

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