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.

   • 1952 July, W. R. Watson, “Sankey Viaduct and Embankment”, in Railway Magazine, page 487:

     The viaduct is joined to the embankment by retaining walls, which have been strengthened since they were constructed by the addition of stay bolts extending right through the embankment and fastened outside each retaining wall.

   • 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.