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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

The change was perceptible even before Pearl Harbor: Vandenberg never had the Chinese Wall mentality of a Wheeler or a Nye or a Bennett Clark or a Ham Fish.

From Time Magazine Archive

There was before them a promised land in the extreme distance, but there intervened a tract of land which seemed as impassable a barrier as the much talked-of, but seldom inspected, Chinese Wall of old.

From My Native Land The United States: its Wonders, its Beauties, and its People; with Descriptive Notes, Character Sketches, Folk Lore, Traditions, Legends and History, for the Amusement of the Old and the Instruction of the Young by Cox, James

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

Once upon a time the line between editorial and advertising, if not exactly a Chinese wall, was somewhat clearer.

From New York Times ● Nov. 25, 2016

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

It was often represented as being enclosed behind the Chinese wall of Hudson's Bay Company exclusiveness, and thus as hopelessly retired.

From The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists The Pioneers of Manitoba by Bryce, George