mall [M17th] The game pall-mall was popular in the 17th century. Players used a mallet to drive a boxwood ball through an iron ring suspended at the end of a long alley, itself also called a pall-mall. The game got its name, via French, from the Italian for ‘ball’ and ‘mallet’. Pall Mall, a street in central London known for its large number of private clubs and formerly a fashionable place to promenade, was originally a pall-mall for the game. From the 18th century other sheltered places for walking came to be called malls—the first reference to a mall for shopping dates from 1950 in the USA. Malleable [LME] got its name from the same source as mall, for it originally meant ‘able to be hammered’ and goes back, like mallet [LME] and maul [ME], to Latin malleus ‘hammer’.