Picket fence

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This article is about the fence variety. For the television series, see Picket Fences. For the radio/telephony term, see Picket fencing.

Typical section of a picket fence

A simple, unpainted picket fence

Western Australian jarrah picket fence.

A picket fence is a variety of fence that has been used mostly for domestic boundaries. It is particularly popular in the United States, where the style has been used since the First Period, and remains popular in current times. Often the fence is painted white (or whitewashed) and made of wood, although modern versions may use plastic that resembles wood. The style is characterized as short with a tapered or pointed top on evenly spaced vertical boards, called pickets.

The fence can be assembled from prefabricated sections, where the posts of each section are posted into the ground but the pickets or boards that make up the fence wall are not inserted into the ground.

A picket fence, ideally white, is seen by some as a symbol of the ideal middle-class suburban life, with a family, children, large house and peaceful living. This stems from the fact that houses in quiet, middle-class neighborhoods often have a picket fence around the garden.^[1] In recent years, some people have associated picket fences with what they regard as the more negative aspects of this lifestyle.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] In popular culture

The words "picket fence" have been known to be applied to describe text where there are unnoticeable or no spaces between the words. Such texts are extremely common in old Latin, where there are no usage of spaces nor punctuation.^[2]