to hit the wall
12
7.7
- phrasal verb
:
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- After running for hours, she suddenly hit the wall and couldn't continue.
- I just hit the wall
- I finally hit the wall
- hit the wall and go
And usually at some point, some people sort of hit the wall with that.
- And usually at some point, some people sort of hit the wall with that.
- So I do this thing where I say, you know, like you hit the wall, you hit the wall with your project.
- And I was I just, I, I, I hit the wall like I, I just had pressure of me fight training weren't going well.
- However, by the one month point I hit the wall, the waxy sebum wasn't shifting at all and it definitely looked like I wasn't washing my hair.
- Then when you hit the wall and you do go no contact, you have built the healthy home, as it were, of healthy people.
Examples
-
On Monday, I hit the wall and realized I couldn't think myself out of the box I was in anymore.
Blog text (7) -
We'd all hit the wall and dropped like flies, sleep for hours.
-
Ten minutes in, the kid hit the wall.
-
How was it before you hit the wall?
-
Then I hit the wall.
-
I'm going to hit the wall.
-
The body literally hits the wall, and it can feel almost impossible to keep moving forward.
Blog text (15) -
Or will we use the extra time to just gain more momentum before we hit the wall?
Blog text (32) -
You're gonna hit the wall!
-
Face it, Dean, you've hit the wall.
Fiction book (1999)
Synonyms
8
4.6
Reach a point where you cannot continue
6
4.8
To lose energy or enthusiasm and stop working well
5
5.8
To get stuck and stop making progress
3
8.4
Start to fail after a time of success
2
5.3
To face an unexpected problem that prevents progress
1
7.4
Start having serious problems that lead to failure
1
6.3
To reach a stage when a person cannot continue and must make a big change
Suddenly stop or fail because of a big problem
Progress stops because people disagree or something blocks it
Antonyms
How Exhausted
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is a fairly direct metaphor: combining 'hit' (to strike or reach) with 'wall' (a barrier) yields the sense of encountering an obstacle that stops progress. A B1 learner who knows both words can likely infer the general idea of running into a barrier, though the specific nuance (e.g., sudden physical exhaustion in a marathon) may not be fully predictable without exposure.
Etymology
The verb hit the wall comes from the picture of a runner who hits a real wall of tiredness and must stop, so it means 'to reach a point where you cannot continue'.