Decorative materials used to cover and ornament interior walls, or digital images used as computer screen backgrounds. Can also refer to the act of applying such materials.
Compound of 'wall' from Old English 'weall' (fortification) and 'paper' from Latin 'papyrus'. Originally referred only to decorative wall coverings from the 16th century, but gained the digital meaning in the 1990s with personal computers.
Wallpaper represents one of humanity's oldest desires to beautify living spaces, evolving from hand-painted Chinese papers in the 1600s to today's digital desktop backgrounds. The digital meaning is a perfect metaphor - we still want to 'decorate' our virtual walls just as we do our physical ones.
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