retaining wall

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".

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