walling

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of wall.

   Walling the courtyard gave the family more privacy.

   Crews are walling up the old doorway with brick.

   Note

   One spelling serves several verbs named wall. Most often it is the builder's verb, frequently with a particle: walling up a doorway, walling in a yard. In gaming slang the same form means using a wallhack, or shooting through a wall. Rarer verbs of the same spelling, to boil and to well up like spring water, share it too. The nouns for walls taken together and building material are spelled the same way.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   Material used in the construction of walls.

   The contractor delivered a fresh load of walling to the site.

   Local quarries supplied most of the walling for the new church.

   Similarmasonry

3. 3
   noununcountable

   A set of walls taken together as a whole.

   Archaeologists mapped the ancient walling that ringed the settlement.

   Much of the fort's defensive walling still stands today.

   Similarfortifications, ramparts

   Note

   Archaeologists and engineers use it both as a mass noun and as a countable one. H. Rider Haggard's She (1886) uncovers "a bared patch of walling", while Schliemann, quoted in Carl Schuchhardt's Schliemann's Excavations, writes of "the inner wallings" as separate runs of wall. In Mel Holley's 2025 RAIL article, walling sits in a list beside fencing, lighting and drainage. Use the plural when individual stretches can be counted, and the mass noun when they cannot.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   A form of torture in which a collar around the victim's neck is used to slam them against a wall.

   Investigators documented several instances of walling at the facility.

   The report condemned walling as a clear violation of human rights.

   Note

   Here the wall is the instrument rather than the thing built. The collar is what turns rough handling into a named method. Because the same word also means building material and the act of building, context has to carry the meaning. Words like documented, condemned or human rights usually make it clear. In a bare sentence about walling at a facility, check which kind is meant before reading it as construction.

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