picket fence
23
2.0
- noun
- /ˈpɪkɪt fɛns/
- Round the house and garden ran a white picket fence.
- a white picket fence
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Watch on YouTubeIf you ask people what is the American dream, the answer is inextricably tied up with a single family home with a white picket fence.
- If you ask people what is the American dream, the answer is inextricably tied up with a single family home with a white picket fence.
- But we drive up and down the streets in America and you look at every house and it's got a little picket fence out front and it's got grass and car in the driveway.
Examples
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Gonna get us a nice little place with a white picket fence.
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"Lilly's property is ringed by a white picket fence that she herself built.
Fiction book (1998) -
You guys got your big houses, white picket fence.
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The next house is gonna have a white picket fence?
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There was a picket fence all along the front of the roses, and a gate at the walk.
Fiction book (2002) -
You live in a nice house with a white picket fence, you've got two boys, 7 and 8, and another on the way.
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Envision a beach house surrounded by a white picket fence.
Academic text (2011) -
I see a weathered old farmhouse with a white picket fence.
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Jim and Lou walk with Dodd and Holland near the picket fence.
Fiction book (1991) -
My husband and I are building a white picket fence to go in front of our house.
Synonyms
567
1.0
A structure around land to mark or protect it
23
2.7
Materials like wood or wire used to make a barrier around land
1
7.2
A fence made of thin upright wooden and metal stakes or one of those stakes
How Private
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly and transparently derived from combining 'picket' (a vertical slat or stake) with 'fence' (an enclosure): it denotes a fence made of pickets. This straightforward noun–noun compounding follows regular English composition and similar constructions exist in many languages, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents should readily infer the meaning.
Etymology
Picket fence comes from the old use of pointed wooden sticks called pickets stuck into the ground to make a fence. These pointed stakes marked a 'boundary' and kept animals out, and when people used neat, low rows of pickets around houses the phrase came to mean the small decorative fences we see around yards today.