fourth wall
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.62 in modern English
19
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
1
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "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."
- "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."
- "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."
- "The fourth wall is the imaginary barrier between the stage and the audience, and the phrase is a metaphor for the dramatic frame."
- "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;"
- "... removes the fourth wall of the nineteenth-century novel and, in doing so, eliminates the border between a fictional inside and a nonfictional outside."
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.