mall
UK[mɔːl]US[mɔːl]
n
A large building or series of connected buildings containing a variety of retail stores and often restaurants and other businesses.
n
A large enclosed shopping area from which traffic is excluded.
Etymology
The word 'mall' has a surprisingly physical and recreational origin. It derives from The Mall, a tree-lined promenade in St. James's Park, London, which was used for playing a 17th-century ball-and-mallet game called pall-mall. The name of the game, and thus the walk, came from the Italian 'pallamaglio', meaning 'ball and mallet'. By the mid-18th century, 'mall' had generalized to mean any public walk or promenade. The modern commercial meaning emerged in the 20th century in the United States, first describing a pedestrianized shopping street, and later evolving to denote the large, enclosed retail complexes we know today, completing the journey from a game field to a leisure walk to a consumer destination.
Analysis
This word is a loanword and a toponym, adopted as a single lexical unit. It is not productively formed from smaller, meaningful English morphemes.
Examples
We spent the afternoon browsing the various stores at the new shopping mall.
The pedestrian mall in the city center is filled with cafes and street performers.
The indoor mall provides a climate-controlled environment for shoppers year-round.