A building material made of gypsum plaster sandwiched between two layers of paper, used to make interior walls and ceilings.
Compound word: 'dry' (not wet) plus 'wall.' Called 'drywall' because it's applied dry (unlike wet plaster), representing a modern invention that replaced traditional wet plaster in 20th-century construction.
Drywall revolutionized building in the 1920s—suddenly you could build interior walls by just screwing sheets to studs, no messy plaster. This single invention made housing cheaper, faster to build, and accessible to millions more people.
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