Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wiktionary
alt. 1 A small or obscure place, especially such a restaurant. 2 (context colloquial chiefly British English) An automated teller machine (ATM). n. 1 A small or obscure place, especially such a restaurant. 2 (context colloquial chiefly British English) An automated teller machine (ATM).
WordNet
n. a small unpretentious out-of-the-way place; "his office was a hole-in-the-wall"
Wikipedia
Hole-in-the-Wall is a remote pass in the Big Horn Mountains of Johnson County, Wyoming. In the late 19th century the Hole in the Wall Gang and Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch gang met at the log cabin which is now preserved at the Old Trail Town museum in Cody, Wyoming.
The Hole-in-the-Wall was a popular saloon and underworld hangout in what is now Financial District, Manhattan, New York City during the early- to mid-19th century. It has been described as the "most notorious" saloon in New York city during the 19th century. It was one of many dive bars and similar establishments in New York's infamous Fourth Ward, located at the corner of Water and Dover Streets. The saloon was owned by "One Armed" Charley Monell and featured notorious female criminals Kate Flannery and Gallus Mag as bouncers. Both women were employed by Monell as lieutenants in his local criminal organization, which included shanghaiing, and the latter woman supposedly kept a collection of human ears which she had bitten off from unruly customers in bar brawls. She displayed these as trophies on the bar in pickle jars. Sadie the Goat, the later leader of the Charlton Street Gang, was of the many victims who lost her ear in a brawl with Gallus Mag.
The bar was widely known as "the most vicious resort in the city", with seven murders having occurred in a two-month period, and it was at the saloon in 1855 that a bar room brawl between waterfront thugs Slobbery Jim and Patsy the Barber, both members of the Daybreak Boys, resulted in Patsy's death. Slobbery Jim was forced to flee the city soon after. The Hole-in-the-Wall was finally closed down by Captain Thomas Woolsey Thorne. According to Richard McDermott, founder of the quarterly New York Chronicle, the Hole-in-the-Wall may have occupied the present-day site of one of New York's oldest surviving saloons, the Bridge Cafe.
The Hole-in-the-Wall is an extraordinary natural arch. The formation consists of a tidal island containing a natural arch that takes the form of a hole pierced through a wall of sandstone and shale by the waves of the sea located at the mouth of the Mpako River, about 8 km due south of Coffee Bay on the Wild Coast Region, Eastern Cape in South Africa.
The natural arch is large enough for a sailboat to cross underneath it with ease. It is reachable by foot just off the beach joining the rock formation to the land at low tide. Visitors and tourists to the formation may find accommodation in the nearby village of the same name.
The local Xhosa inhabitants call it esiKhaleni or 'Place of Noise'. According to a Xhosa legend a beautiful maiden who lived in a village on the shores of a coastal lagoon separated from the sea by a sheer cliff, fell in love with a man of the legendary sea-people. On hearing of the unnatural liaison, her angry father forbade her to see her lover or leave the village. One night her lover came to the cliff with his people and rammed a gaping hole through the cliff using the head of an enormous fish. Through this breach they streamed to the village singing and shouting; all the villagers hid, except the maiden, who rushed into the arms of her lover. She was never heard of again. Under certain conditions the waves slap the rocks with a resounding crack, and the hole roars during storms. Tribesmen believe that these are the sounds of the sea-people singing and shouting, hence the name of the place, esiKhaleni.
The ship Santo Alberto ran aground in 1593 near Hole-in-the-Wall.
On 4/5 August 1991 the luxury liner Oceanos sank 5 km off shore near Hole-in-the-Wall. All 571 passengers and crew were rescued, mostly by helicopter.
Usage examples of "hole-in-the-wall".
Most of this pile is colocated with a bonded warehouse, but one wing sticks out into a real hole-in-the-wall shipping operation.
It was a little hole-in-the-wall of black-painted brick, shoehorned between brownstones that seemed to sag under the weight of innumerable layers of graffiti.
I rounded a corner and nearly tripped over a wirehead sitting on the sidewalk in front of a hole-in-the-wall hardware store.
Most of this pile is collocated with a bonded warehouse, but one wing sticks out into a real hole-in-the-wall shipping operation.
These housed the businesses necessary to keep the casinos operating, such as laundries and warehouses, as well as the hole-in-the-wall hotels where the minimum-wage employees made their homes.
Though the worker in a hole-in-the-wall bazaar factory is certainly in a different position from a big moneylender in the market, both the factory worker and the moneylender are bazaaris, because they are both involved in petty trade of a traditional, or a nearly traditional, type, centered around the bazaar and its Islamic culture.
The Admiralty ought to stop frittering away detachments in every hole-in-the-wall system and concentrate larger forces in nodal positions responsible for covering several systems each.
She was in their hole-in-the-wall office downtown, an ancient brick building that had once contained a jewelry store.