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wallpaper

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • //ˈwɔːlˌpeɪpə//

Decorative paper-like material used to cover the inner walls of buildings.

noun

  1. 1

    Decorative paper-like material used to cover the inner walls of buildings.

  2. 2

    A roll of such paper.

  3. 3

    A style or design of such material.

    He is letting her select the wallpapers for the whole house.

  4. 4

    figurativeAnything that serves as a background or part of the surroundings.

    This was not the wallpaper television that flickered away in the background in every dealing room but was not really watched. This was finely targeted and timely broadcast of stuff dealers would want to drop everything to watch.

    Her experiences are too early and too much part of the emotional wallpaper to be grasped in this way.

  5. 5

    An image or tiled pattern used as the background of a computer desktop.

    He chose a Minecraft design as his computer's wallpaper.

    You can design your own wallpaper using Paintbrush. A wallpaper appears on your desktop in tiles. The number of tiles that are needed to cover the desktop depends on the size of the canvas you use to create a wallpaper.

  6. 6

    slangGeneric footage of a building or location that may be used in the background of a related news report.

    Scripts that include brief reference to a picture turn stock footage from 'wallpaper' to illustration.

    News bulletins on television may need general rather than specific footage. This is known as wallpaper — moving pictures over which the news item is read.

  7. 7

    informalGaudy mass-produced stamps, typically of little or no value and only produced for sale to collectors.

  8. 8

    A radio operator's collection of awards and QSL cards.

    Some of my wallpaper includes ORS, OPS […]

    So if you are a technical ham and are looking for one more piece of "wallpaper" to put up at the shack, consider […]

    Wallpaper. Hams love awards, and thousands of awards are available.

Etymology

From wall + paper.

verb

  1. 1

    To cover (a wall, a room, etc) with wallpaper.

Forms

plural
wallpapers
past tense
wallpapered
past participle
wallpapered
present participle
wallpapering
third person singular
wallpapers
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).