Wallboard

Description

Any rigid sheet of material used for covering interior walls and ceilings. Wallboards are used as a substitute for plaster, as decoration and as quick or temporary support surfaces. Wallboard has been made from a variety of materials over the years. Originally, wallboards were a laminated pasteboard made from wood pulp, waste paper, bagasse, or rags. The paper panels were soaked in linseed oil, dried, then painted or lacquered. In 1926, the Masonite process for producing a thin, dense fiberboard, or hardboard, was developed. A third type of wallboard made from gypsum is called drywall or plasterboard. It is composed of a gypsum core sandwiched between two layers of paper. Gypsum board is fire resistance, dimensionally stable, and inexpensive. Examples of some types of wallboard are: beaverboard; board Upson board, Masonite; Iso-board; Medex, board particle board, Duron, waferboard, drywall, and Sheetrock.

Synonyms and Related Terms

wall board; gypsum board; drywall; dry-wall; fiberboard

Authority

• G.S.Brady, G.S.Brady, Materials Handbook, McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York, 1971 Comment: p. 386

• Ralph Mayer, Ralph Mayer, A Dictionary of Art Terms and Techniques, Harper and Row Publishers, New York, 1969 (also 1945 printing)

• Dictionary of Building Preservation, Ward Bucher, ed., John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York City, 1996

• Thomas C. Jester (ed.), Thomas C. Jester (ed.), Twentieth-Century Building Materials, McGraw-Hill Companies, Washington DC, 1995

• Random House, Random House, Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, Grammercy Book, New York, 1997

• The American Heritage Dictionary or Encarta, via Microsoft Bookshelf 98, Microsoft Corp., 1998

• Art and Architecture Thesaurus Online, http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/aat/, J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles, 2000