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• Chinese Wall
  Chinese Wall

  noun

  Great Wall of China.
• Chinese wall
  Chinese wall

  noun

  a notional barrier between the parts of a business, esp between the market makers and brokers of a stock-exchange business, across which no information should pass to the detriment of clients

Chinese Wall

American  

noun

Informal.

1. Great Wall of China.

2. an insuperable barrier or obstacle, as to understanding.

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Chinese wall British  

noun

1. a notional barrier between the parts of a business, esp between the market makers and brokers of a stock-exchange business, across which no information should pass to the detriment of clients

2. an insurmountable obstacle

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Etymology

Origin of Chinese Wall

First recorded in 1905–10

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

Chinese Wall Chinese wall

So they had stayed put Friday when Butte County deputies drove through with loudspeakers and ordered evacuation of a large swath of mountain land off Chinese Wall Road.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 11, 2017

When I was managing Korrespondent, which at the time was the leading newsmagazine in Ukraine, we didn’t have a Chinese Wall or a picket fence.

From Forbes ● Mar. 29, 2015

And when the Chinese Wall was built, where did the masons go for lunch?

From Salon ● May 21, 2012

So that all frontiers should fall, we surrounded ourselves with a Chinese Wall.

From Time Magazine Archive

The Appalachians made a true Chinese Wall, shutting all England-in-America, in those early days, out from the vast inland plateau of the continent, keeping upon the seaboard all England-in-America, from the north to the south.

From Pioneers of the Old South: a chronicle of English colonial beginnings by Johnston, Mary

How secure was the Chinese wall that supposedly separates the data of users of Facebook’s Calibra wallet from their activities in Facebook?

From The Guardian ● Jul. 21, 2019

Journalists like to use hoary metaphors to describe the protection of editorial purpose from commercial intervention: church-state, Chinese wall.

From The New Yorker ● Jan. 28, 2016

"I'm here to help my new friends to build a big wall, like the Chinese wall."

From BBC ● Oct. 30, 2015

“I like the idea that the writer writes and the reader reads and there’s pretty much a Chinese wall between the two.”

From New York Times ● Jun. 10, 2015

They are enclosed by a curtain more impenetrable than the Chinese wall.

From Physiology of The Opera by Swaby, John H.