Molly-guard
//ˈmɑli ɡɑɹd// noun
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 A physical barrier to protect something from unwanted contact, especially a shield to prevent accidental tripping of an emergency shutdown or power switch.
"There is a plastic molly-guard covering the escalator's shutdown button to prevent little kids from pushing it and stopping the escalator."
Example
More examples"There is a plastic molly-guard covering the escalator's shutdown button to prevent little kids from pushing it and stopping the escalator."
Etymology
From Molly (female given name) + guard. Originally a Plexiglas cover improvised for the Big Red Switch on an IBM 4341 mainframe after a programmer's toddler daughter (named Molly) tripped it twice in one day. Later generalised to covers over stop/reset switches on disk drives and networking equipment.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.