Great Firewall
Britishnoun
Etymology
Origin of Great Firewall
C21: a play on the Great Wall of China
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
They reflect the country’s longstanding efforts to control public discourse, including setting up the Great Firewall in the early 2000s.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 24, 2025
Resourceful activists have been finding new ways to get around this but even those few cracks in the Great Firewall - like AirDrop - are now slowly being plugged.
From BBC ● Jun. 8, 2023
“If more videos or information jumps across the Great Firewall of China, then obviously it’s outside the control of China’s online censorship machine.”
From Washington Post ● Dec. 2, 2022
A number of accounts on Twitter have collected videos of the unrest from those behind China’s Great Firewall and posted them.
From New York Times ● Nov. 30, 2022
Though both are banned in China, Wang hopes his reports will trickle over China’s Great Firewall and into the country.
From Seattle Times ● Oct. 19, 2022
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
