Shopping centers mushroomed in the 1950s but weren’t called malls until 1967.
The word Mall comes from the popular sixteenth-century Italian ball and mallet game palamaglio, which came to England as pall-mall, pronounced “pell mell”.
By the eighteenth century the game had been forgotten, except on the name of a London street where it had been played and on a parallel ritzy avenue named the Mall, where fashionable aristocrats strolled and shopped.
