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''pale'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260904120411-00-⌔

pale - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adjective

pale (comparative paler, superlative palest)

  • Light in color.
    • ✤ I have pale yellow wallpaper.
    • ✤ She had pale skin because she didn’t get much sunlight.
    • ✤ She turned pale and screamed on seeing the spider in the toilet.
    • ✤ “Heavens!” exclaimed Nina, “the blue-stocking and the fogy!—and yours are pale blue, Eileen!—you’re about as self-conscious as Drina—slumping there with your hair tumbling à la Mérode! Oh, it’s very picturesque, of course, but a straight spine and good grooming is better. […] ”1
    • ✤ A rangy, gangly, Scandinavian youth of a sailor, droop-shouldered, six feet six and slender as a lath, with pallid eyes of palest blue and skin and hair attuned to the same colour scheme, joined Kwaque in his work.2
    • ✤ Three years later, the unwatered cactus was still about two feet tall, a dark green color. The watered cactus was a paler green, its trunk visibly swollen with moisture. It had grown to be over five feet tall.3
  • (of human skin) Having a pallor (a light color, especially due to sickness, shock, fright etc.).
    • ✤ His face turned pale after hearing about his mother’s death.
    • ✤ Mr. Campion appeared suitably impressed and she warmed to him. He was very easy to talk to with those long clown lines in his pale face, a natural goon, born rather too early she suspected.4
  • Feeble, faint.
    • ✤ He is but a pale shadow of his former self.
    • ✤ The son’s clumsy paintings are a pale imitation of his father’s.
    • ✤ Many in the gay community were quick to assure everyone that gay marriage was not on the horizon. One community leader even tried to stop the introduction of a “domestic partnership” bill—at best a pale substitute for marriage—claiming that it would have polarized our opposition.5

Verb

pale (third-person singular simple present pales, present participle paling, simple past and past participle paled)

  • (intransitive) To turn pale; to lose colour.
    • ✤ Synonym: blanch
    • ✤ But a man—/Note men!—they are but women after all,/As women are but Auroras!—there are men/Born tender, apt to pale at a trodden worm,/Who paint for pastime, in their favourite dream,/Spruce auto-vestments flowered with crocus-flames/There are, too, who believe in hell and lie: […]6
  • (intransitive) To become insignificant.
    • ✤ *(Although the conditions are rather different, the generosity of the offer certainly pales by comparison with the “Eurailpass” now available to tourists from North and South America at $125 (£44 13s.), which allows two months’ * unlimited first class travel throughout the railway systems of thirteen countries —[…].)7
    • ✤ Its financing pales next to the tens of billions that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will have at its disposal, especially with the coming infusion of some $3 billion a year from Warren E. Buffett, the founder of Berkshire Hathaway.8
    • ✤ The matter of whether the world needs a fourth Ice Age movie pales beside the question of why there were three before it, but Continental Drift feels less like an extension of a theatrical franchise than an episode of a middling TV cartoon, lolling around on territory that’s already been settled.9
  • (transitive) To make pale; to diminish the brightness of.
    • ✤ The Glow-worme ſhowes the Matine to be neere,/And gins to pale his vneffectuall Fire:/Adue, adue, Hamlet: remember me.10

Noun

pale

  • (obsolete) Paleness; pallor.
    • ✤ The boare (quoth ſhe) whereat a ſuddain pale,/Like lawne being ſpred vpon the bluſhing roſe,/Vſurpes her cheeke, ſhe trembles at his tale,/And on his neck her yoaking armes ſhe throwes.11

Noun

pale (plural pales)

  • A wooden stake; a picket.
    • ✤ […] if you deſign it a Fence to keep in Deer, at every eight or ten Foot diſtance, ſet a Poſt with a Mortice in it to ſtand a little ſloping over the ſide of the Bank about two Foot high; and into the Mortices put a Rail […] and no Deer will go over it, nor can they creep through it, as they do often, when a Pale tumbles down.12
    • ✤ Ceiling joists were sometimes grooved to receive riven staves or pales that secured mud-and-straw walling.13
    • ✤ * Pales (irregular, hand-riven, 1′′ × 4′′ boards) are inserted into grooves on both sides of the floor joists; on top of these, similar pales are laid at right angles; finally a plasterlike mixture is poured over and around the top pales,*14
  • (archaic) A fence made from wooden stake; palisade.
    • ✤ How are we park’d and bounded in a pale,/A little herd of England’s timorous deer,/Mazed with a yelping kennel of French curs!15
    • ✤ Fourthly, they ſhall not vpon any occaſion whatſoeuer breake downe any of our pales, or come into any of our Townes or forts by any other waies, iſſues or ports then ordinary […]16
  • (by extension) Limits, bounds (especially before of).
    • ✤ But let my due feet never fail,/To walk the ſtudious cloyſters pale,/And love the high embowed roof,/With antic pillars maſſy proof,/And ſtoried windows richly dight,/Caſting a dim religious light.17
    • ✤ The moſſy pales that ſkirt the orchard-green,/Here hid by ſhrub-vvood, there by glimpſes ſeen; […]18
    • ✤ Men so situated, beyond the pale of the honor and the law, are not to be trusted.19
    • ✤ All things considered, we advise the male reader to keep his desires in check till he is at least twenty-five, and the female not to enter the pale of wedlock until she has attained the age of twenty.20
  • (heraldry) A vertical band down the middle of a shield.
    • ✤ Hypernym: ordinary
    • ✤ Coordinate terms: pallet, endorse, cottise
    • ✤ The shield was silver, charged with a red cross voided (that is, with the centre cut out and only the edges left), between in chief (that is, above the horizontal limb of the cross) two black dragon’s wings, and in base two red daggers, and in the centre of the cross a black winged helmet; on a red chief (a broad band across the top of the shield), a silver pale (a broad vertical band), and thereon eight black arrows crossed X-wise, four and four, and encircled with a black band, between on the dexter three bendlets (narrow bands slanting from dexter chief to sinister base) enhanced (that is, raised above the centre), and on the sinister a fleur-de-lis, all of gold.21
  • (archaic) A territory or defensive area within a specific boundary or under a given jurisdiction.
    • (historical) The parts of Ireland under English jurisdiction.
    • (historical) The territory around Calais under English control (from the 14th to 16th centuries).
      • ✤ He knows the fortifications – crumbling – and beyond the city walls the lands of the Pale, its woods, villages and marshes, its sluices, dykes and canals.22
      • ✤ A low-lying, marshy enclave stretching eighteen miles along the coast and pushing some eight to ten miles inland, the Pale of Calais nestled between French Picardy to the west and, to the east, the imperial-dominated territories of Flanders.23
    • (historical) A portion of Russia in which Jews were permitted to live (the Pale of Settlement).
  • (archaic) The jurisdiction (territorial or otherwise) of an authority.
  • A cheese scoop.24

Verb

pale (third-person singular simple present pales, present participle paling, simple past and past participle paled)

  • To enclose with pales, or as if with pales; to encircle or encompass; to fence off.
    • ✤ […] your iſle, which ſtands/As Neptunes Parke, ribb’d, and pal’d in/With Oakes vnſkaleable, and roaring Waters,/With Sands that will not bear your Enemies Boates,/But ſuck them vp to th’ Top-maſt.25

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation, General American) enPR: pāl, IPA: /peɪl/
  • Audio (US); [ˈpʰeəɫ]: 🔊
  • Rhymes: -eɪl
  • Homophone: pail

Etymology 1

From Middle English pale, from Old French pale, from Latin pallidus (“pale, pallid”), from palleō (“to be pale; to grow pale; to fade”), from Proto-Indo-European ﹡pelito-, from ﹡pelH- (“gray”). Doublet of pallid. Displaced native Old English blāc.

Etymology 2

From Middle English pale, pal, borrowed from Old French pal, from Latin pālus (“stake, prop”). English inherited the word pole (or, rather Old English pāl) from a much older Proto-Germanic borrowing of the same Latin word.

Doublet of peel and pole.

Printed 2026-09-04.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1907 August, Robert W[illiam] Chambers, chapter IX, in The Younger Set, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company, →OCLC: ↩

  2. 1917, Jack London, chapter XV, in Michael, Brother of Jerry: ↩

  3. 2013, Leslie Morgan Steiner, The Baby Chase: ↩

  4. 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 5, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC: ↩

  5. 1991 February 11, Jeffery R. Nickel, “Going To The Chapel”, in Gay Community News, volume 18, number 29, page 8: ↩

  6. 1856, Elizabeth Browning, Aurora Leigh, New York: C. S. Francis & Co., published 1857, page 282: ↩

  7. 1959 May, “Talking of Trains: “Rail-rovers” again”, in Trains Illustrated, page 236: ↩

  8. 2006 September 14, Katie Hafner, “Philanthropy Google’s Way: Not the Usual”, in The New York Times ‎, archived from the original on 27 November 2022: ↩

  9. 12 July 2012, Sam Adams, AV Club Ice Age: Continental Drift ↩

  10. c. 1599–1602 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene v], page 258, column 1, lines 89–91: ↩

  11. 1593, [William Shakespeare], Venus and Adonis, London: […] Richard Field, […], →OCLC, lines [589–592]: ↩

  12. 1707, John Mortimer, The Whole Art of Husbandry, London: H. Mortlock & J. Robinson, 2nd edition, 1708, Chapter 1, pp. 11-12, ↩

  13. 1997, Gabrielle M. Lanier, Bernard L. Herman, Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic, page 90: ↩

  14. 2015, Mark E. Reinberger, Elizabeth McLean, The Philadelphia Country House: ↩

  15. 1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Sixt”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act IV, scene ii]: ↩

  16. 1615, Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia ‎, London: William Welby, page 13: ↩

  17. 1645, John Milton, Il Penseroso, in The Poetical Works of Milton, volume II, Edinburgh: Sands, Murray, and Cochran, published 1755, p. 151, lines 155–160: ↩

  18. 1798, [Samuel Rogers], “An Epistle to a Friend”, in An Epistle to a Friend, with Other Poems. […], London: […] R. Noble, for T[homas] Cadell, Junior, and W[illiam] Davies, […], →OCLC, page 10, lines 19–20: ↩

  19. 1900, Jack London, The Son of the Wolf:The Wisdom of the Trail: ↩

  20. 1919, B. G. Jefferis, J. L. Nichols, Searchlights on Health:When and Whom to Marry: ↩

  21. 1956 July, Col. H. C. B. Rogers, “Railway Heraldry”, in Railway Magazine, page 479: ↩

  22. 2009, Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall, Fourth Estate, published 2010, page 402: ↩

  23. 2011, Thomas Penn, Winter King, Penguin, published 2012, page 73: ↩

  24. P. L. Simmonds, A Dictionary of Trade Products, Commercial, Manufacturing, and Technical Terms, London: Routledge, 1858, p. 272, ↩

  25. 1611 April (first recorded performance), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Cymbeline”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene i]: ↩