Mall

How to spell mall

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mall

What does mall mean?

1. nounA large enclosed building or complex containing many shops and walkways.

Mall in a sentence

• The new mall has more than two hundred shops under one roof.

• They spent the rainy afternoon wandering around the mall.

Where does mall come from?

Language of origin: Italian

The word traces back to the 16th-century game of pall-mall, an Italian and French pastime in which players drove a wooden ball through a hoop with a mallet; its name came from Italian 'palla' meaning 'ball' and 'maglio' meaning 'mallet', via French. The long, level alley used to play it became known simply as a 'mall', and one such alley beside St James's Park in London survives as the famous street 'The Mall'. From this idea of a sheltered, paved promenade for strolling, the word drifted by the 1960s, especially in North America, to mean a large enclosed shopping centre full of walkways. So the modern shopping 'mall' is, oddly, named after a Renaissance croquet-like game. Note that 'mall' sounds exactly like 'maul', the verb for savaging or handling roughly, which is the spelling trap to watch.

How the word is built

• mall (from 'pall-mall', the old ball-and-mallet game whose alley gave the word its sense of a long walk)