Wallpaper

How to spell wallpaper

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce wallpaper

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wallpaper mean?

1. nounDecorative paper pasted onto the interior walls of a room.
2. nounThe background image displayed behind the icons on a computer or phone screen.
3. verbTo cover a wall or room with decorative paper.

Wallpaper in a sentence

• noun

  The bedroom wallpaper had faded after years of sunlight.

• noun

  He set a photo of the coast as his desktop wallpaper.

• verb

  They plan to wallpaper the spare room over the weekend.

• noun

  They chose a striped wallpaper for the narrow hallway.

• noun

  The new phone shipped with a plain blue wallpaper.

• verb

  It took two days to wallpaper the entire staircase.

Where does wallpaper come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, made simply by joining 'wall' to 'paper'. The first element, 'wall', comes from the Old English weall, which itself was borrowed early from the Latin vallum, meaning a rampart or fortified barrier of stakes. The second element, 'paper', traces back through Old French papier to the Latin papyrus, the name of the Egyptian reed whose pith was pressed into writing sheets in the ancient world. The combined term arose in the eighteenth century to describe decorative printed paper pasted onto interior walls, replacing earlier hung cloths and painted plaster. In the late twentieth century the word gained a fresh life in computing, where it names the background image displayed behind the icons on a screen.

How the word is built

• wall (from Old English weall, a defensive rampart or side of a building)
• paper (from Latin papyrus, the reed-based writing material)