Chalkface

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A cliff or quarry exposing chalk, e.g. the White Cliffs of Dover
  2. 2
    The environment where teaching is carried out, specifically a school.

Etymology

From chalk + face. In the education sense, it is a play on coalface (“place where practical work is done”), after the chalk used on school blackboards, and is believed to have been coined by Ted Wragg for his Times Educational Supplement column.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.