Dictionary

fourth wall en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• (Australia) audio

Etymology

A reference to the three walls of a box set, with the fourth wall being the imaginary wall separating the performers from the audience. Coined by philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot in 1758 and thus a calque of French quatrième mur.

Meanings

1. (idiomatic, qualifier:performing arts) The imaginary invisible wall at the front of the stage in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play.
   • There's been a convention in the theater world to think of the division between audience and spectacle as a fourth wall, a wall that the playwright tries to eliminate through the force of his drama. 2005 August 31, Philip Kennicott, “Our Aura of Security, Shattered Like Glass”, in Washington Post, page C01:
   • This is a flat, unnecessary, and strangely disturbing denial of the fourth-wall convention, that unwritten agreement between playwright and playgoer whereby you think of yourself at the theatre as a privileged, exonerated, comfortably seated eavesdropper. 1916 February 20, “Second Thoughts on First Nights”, in New York Times, page X7:
2. (broadly) The boundary between the fiction and the audience.
   • ... removes the fourth wall of the nineteenth-century novel and, in doing so, eliminates the border between a fictional inside and a nonfictional outside. 2004, Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them, page 207:
   • The fourth wall is the imaginary barrier between the stage and the audience, and the phrase is a metaphor for the dramatic frame. 2003, Robert Keith Sawyer, Improvised Dialogues: Emergence and Creativity in Conversation, page 107:
   • Even though you, the author, may be maintaining a fourth wall between your characters and your readers, he, the narrator, is not keeping that fourth wall between himself and the audience he thinks he's telling the story to. 1999, Orson Scott Card, (Please provide the book title or journal name):
   • As actors, we are still looking out into the imaginary fourth wall. The difference is that in film, the fourth wall is no longer fixed; 2003, Cathy Haase, Acting for Film, page 92:
   • I've saved the worst for last. The crudest scheme is to drop the fourth wall and advise players as to actions that are inhibiting 2005, Chris Crawford, Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, page 208:

Forms

Deriveds

fourth wall joke · break the fourth wall

Translations (20)

es cuarta pared (boundary between fiction and audience) · de vierte Wand (imaginary invisible wall in theatre) · de vierte Wand (boundary between fiction and audience) · pl czwarta ściana (boundary between fiction and audience) · ka მეოთხე კედელი (imaginary invisible wall in theatre) · hi चौथी दीवार (boundary between fiction and audience) · ka მეოთხე კედელი (boundary between fiction and audience) · tr dördüncü duvar (boundary between fiction and audience) · fi neljäs seinä (boundary between fiction and audience) · fi neljäs seinä (imaginary invisible wall in theatre) · pt quarta parede (boundary between fiction and audience) · it quarta parete (boundary between fiction and audience) · tr dördüncü duvar (imaginary invisible wall in theatre) · fr quatrième mur (boundary between fiction and audience) · ja 第四の壁 (boundary between fiction and audience) · nl vierde wand (imaginary invisible wall in theatre) · nl vierde wand (boundary between fiction and audience) · cmn 第四面牆 /第四面墙 (imaginary invisible wall in theatre) · cmn 第四面牆 /第四面墙 (boundary between fiction and audience) · hi चौथी दीवार (imaginary invisible wall in theatre)