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
Awkward
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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.
Sprinter Brittany Brown, a bronze medalist at the 2024 Paris Olympics, now has a mural at the Claremont elementary school where she ran to escape childhood hardships.
From Los Angeles Times • May 18, 2026
Schulz was an illustrator as well as a writer, and before he was murdered during the war he was forced to paint a bedroom mural for an occupying Nazi officer in what is now Ukraine.
From The Wall Street Journal • May 15, 2026
A fish tank at the entrance features a Route 66 theme, as does a mural on a small wall of the parking lot.
From Los Angeles Times • May 12, 2026
Mounfield said he had spoken to people from all over the UK who had travelled up to have a photograph next to the mural - which he described as "amazing".
From BBC • May 11, 2026
The dim Chapel of Calvary held a mournful mural of Jesus lying arms outspread and dead on the cross after it was taken down and laid on the ground.
From "Habibi" by Naomi Shihab Nye
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.
