mural
Americannoun
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a large picture painted or affixed directly on a wall or ceiling.
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a greatly enlarged photograph attached directly to a wall.
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a wallpaper pattern representing a landscape or the like, often with very widely spaced repeats so as to produce the effect of a mural painting on a wall of average size; a trompe l'oeil.
adjective
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of, relating to, or resembling a wall.
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executed on or affixed to a wall.
mural inscriptions.
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pertaining to any of several astronomical instruments that were affixed to a wall aligned on the plane of a meridian, and were formerly used to measure the altitude of celestial bodies.
a mural quadrant; a mural circle.
noun
adjective
Discover More
The Mexican artist Diego Rivera was noted for his production of murals.
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of mural
1400–50; late Middle English < Latin mūrālis, equivalent to mūr ( us ) wall + -ālis -al 1
Explanation
A mural is a large-scale painting usually done on a wall. Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, is famous for the plaster murals he painted on the walls at Rockefeller Center in the 1930s. Famous murals include the wall designs in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican in Rome, and the Coit Tower murals in San Francisco. Many murals were created during the Renaissance, and again during the New Deal. They are also common features of urban settings — painted on the outsides of buildings and on playground walls.
Vocabulary lists containing mural
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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.
Not far from there, around Pacoima’s city hall, you’ll find Mural Mile, block after block of artworks done with color, ingenuity, humor, passion and meaning, and changing all the time.
From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 12, 2024
The words were scrawled under the Fairfax Community Mural, by artist Art Mortimer.
From Los Angeles Times • Nov. 1, 2023
Conversely, one of the artist’s best-known works, the jumbo-size “Bauhaus Stairway Mural: The Large Version,” has been removed from its supposedly permanent digs in Beverly Hills.
From New York Times • Sep. 20, 2023
It was shoulder to shoulder at the Mural Amphitheatre, possibly the largest Bumbershoot crowd to gather at the stage for a homegrown artist in years.
From Seattle Times • Sep. 3, 2023
“Then make sure he gets the Mural Crown,” Mars demanded.
From "The Son of Neptune" by Rick Riordan
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.
