retaining wall

English

Noun

retaining wall (plural retaining walls)

1. (civil engineering) Any of several structures used to restrain a vertical-faced mass of earth.

   Hyponyms: gravity wall, piling wall, diaphragm wall, cantilevered wall

   • 1939 November, “Pertinent Paragraphs”, in Railway Magazine, page 358, photo caption:

     Masonry flying arches strutting the retaining walls in Chorley cutting, Manchester-Blackpool line, L.M.S.R.

   • 1962 June, David Walters, “The new station and layout at Coventry”, in Modern Railways, page 405:

     In order to accommodate the new platform 4 and the reversibly signalled slow line, a deep cutting had to be cut back and held up in places with a concrete retaining wall.

   • 2020 August 26, Tim Dunn, “Great railway bores of our time!”, in Rail, page 43:

     Biddle even notes how Brunel, after observing how one retaining wall had part-collapsed during the construction of one of the GWR's Bristol tunnels during heavy rains, "decided to leave it like that and planted it with ivy to represent a ruined medieval gateway".

Translations

structure

• Catalan: mur de contenció m
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 護土牆／护土墙 (hùtǔqiáng)

• Dutch: keermuur (nl) m, keerwand (nl) m
• Finnish: tukimuuri
• French: mur de soutènement (fr) m
• Galician: socalco m, bancal m
• German: Stützmauer f, Stützwand f, Brüstung (de) f, Schwergewichtsmauer f
• Hindi: धारक भित्‍ति f (dhārak bhit‍ti)
• Italian: muro di sostegno m
• Japanese: 擁壁 (ja) (ようへき, yōheki)
• Korean: 옹벽(擁壁) (ongbyeok)
• Latin: abamūrus m
• Maori: takitaki-ā-manu
• Russian: подпо́рная сте́нка f (podpórnaja sténka)
• Spanish: muro de contención m
• Swedish: stödmur (sv) c
• Ukrainian: підпорна стіна (pidporna stina)
• Vietnamese: tường chắn đất

References

• “retaining wall”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.