A bowing wall has developed a curved, outward bulge along its face, usually near the mid-height of a retaining wall or basement wall, caused by soil, water, or frost pressure pushing against the wall faster than the wall or its drainage can handle.
Bowing is different from leaning: a leaning wall tilts as a single unit from its base, while a bowing wall curves in the middle because the pressure is concentrated partway up the wall, often where saturated soil or hydrostatic pressure builds behind it. Once a wall starts to bow, the mortar joints and any reinforcement are already carrying load they weren't designed for, and the bow tends to get worse over time rather than stabilize on its own.
For retaining walls in the foothills, bowing is almost always a drainage problem: water builds up behind the wall, freezes and expands during freeze-thaw season, and pushes on the wall from the inside. A wall that's just starting to bow can sometimes be corrected by rebuilding the section with proper drainage aggregate and a weep system so the water has somewhere to go besides against the wall face. A wall with a pronounced bulge usually needs to come down and be rebuilt, because at that point the structure has already failed and more backfill against it only makes the problem worse.
More masonry vocabulary from the glossary.
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