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''pall'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260715204347-00-⌔

pall - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

pall (plural palls)

  • Senses relating to cloth.
    • (archaic, poetic) Fine cloth, especially purple cloth used for robes.
    • A heavy cloth laid over a coffin or tomb; a shroud laid over a corpse.
      • ✤ After his death he[Diocletian] remained corporeally in possession of the palace, his tomb resting in the centre of the mausoleum. Thirty years or so later, a woman was put to death for stealing the purple pall from his sarcophagus, a strange, crazy crime, […]1
    • (Christianity) A piece of cardboard, covered with linen and embroidered on one side, used to cover the chalice during the Eucharist.
    • (Christianity, obsolete) A cloth used for various purposes on the altar in a church, such as a corporal (“cloth on which elements of the Eucharist are placed”) or frontal (“drapery covering the front of an altar”).
  • Senses relating to clothing.
    • (archaic) An outer garment; a cloak, mantle, or robe.
      • ✤ In a long purple pall, whose ſkirt with gold,/Was fretted all about, ſhe was arayd, […]2
      • ✤ His [Hercules ‘s] Lyons skin chaungd to a pall of gold,/In which forgetting warres, he onely ioyed/In combats of ſweet loue, and with his miſtreſſe toyed.3
    • (figuratively) Something that covers or surrounds like a cloak; in particular, a cloud of dust, smoke, etc., or a feeling of fear, gloom, or suspicion.
      • ✤ The early election results cast a pall over what was supposed to be a celebration.
      • ✤ A pall came over the crowd when the fourth goal was scored.
      • ✤ The smoke- pall of industrial Lancashire hung over the landscape; perhaps slagscape would be a more fitting term. The general prospect was a succession of chimney-stacks, factories, pit-heads, slagheaps, junctions, sidings and coal wagons.4
      • ✤ Night has spread her pall once more,
        And the prisoner still is free:
        Open is his dungeon door,
        Useless now his dungeon key!        5
      • ✤ […] and the pillar of smoke which had recently begun to dissipate, as many of the fires amidships had been smothered by the onrushing water, was replaced by a vast mushroom cloud of steam, smoke, flame, and debris as the magazines detonated. In the pall of this apocalyptic destruction, the U.S. fleet takes stock.6
    • (Christianity) Especially in Roman Catholicism: a pallium (“liturgical vestment worn over the chasuble”).
      • ✤ By the way, a pall is a pontifical vestment, considerable for the matter, making, and mysteries thereof. […] But, to speak plainly, the mystery of mysteries in this pall was, that the archbishops’receiving it showed therein their dependence on Rome; and a mote, in this manner ceremoniously taken, was an acknowledgement of their subjection. And as it owned Rome’s power, so in after-ages it increased their profit. For, though now such palls were freely given to archbishops, […] yet in after-ages the archbishop of Canterbury’s pall was sold for five thousand florins: […]7
      • ✤ Or it might be a magnificent pall, in the days in which this garment had lost its primitive character, that taxed the skill and the patience of the fair needlewoman. It was about the year a.d. 601 that Pope Gregory[I] sent two archbishop’s palls into England; the one for London, which see was afterwards removed to Canterbury, and the other to York.8
    • (heraldry) A charge representing an archbishop’s pallium, having the form of the letter Y, sometimes charged with crosses.
      • ✤ Synonyms: cross-pall, pairle
      • ✤ *The flag of South Africa has a green pall *

Verb

pall (third-person singular simple present palls, present participle palling, simple past and past participle palled)

  • (transitive) To cloak or cover with, or as if with, a pall.
    • ✤ Come, thick Night,/And pall thee in the dunneſt ſmoake of Hell,/That my keene Knife ſee not the Wound it makes,/Nor Heauen peepe through the Blanket of the darke,/To cry, hold, hold.9

Verb

pall (third-person singular simple present palls, present participle palling, simple past and past participle palled)

  • (transitive) To make vapid or insipid; to make lifeless or spiritless; to dull, to weaken.
    • ✤ […] Reaſon and Reflection, which by repreſenting perpetually to the mind of Man the meanneſs of all ſenſual Gratifications, do, in great meaſure, blunt the edge of his keeneſt Deſires, and pall all his Enjoyments.10
  • (intransitive) To become dull, insipid, tasteless, or vapid; to lose life, spirit, strength, or taste.
    • ✤ The liquor palls.
    • ✤ [T]he ale and byere haue palled, and were nought, by cause such ale and biere hathe taken wynde in spurgyng. (please add an English translation of this quotation)]11
    • ✤ Beauty ſoon grows familiar to the lover,/Fades in the eye, and palls upon the ſenſe.12
    • ✤ He interests himself in nothing: he scarcely cares to go beyond the garden-gate. Even Captain Glanders and Captain Strong pall upon him […]13
    • ✤ We are all becoming accustomed to adventure. It is beginning to pall on us. We suffered no casualties and there was no illness.14
    • ✤ And one day the new port palled, like a book one has read too often, or a picture one has looked at over-long. And it was sheet home the royals and off to a new port, where there were new strange people, and streets laid another way, and other things in the merchants’ booths, and a new language to pick up a phrase or two of.15
  • ✤ (please add an English translation of this quotation)]

Noun

pall (plural palls)

  • (obsolete, rare) A feeling of nausea caused by disgust or overindulgence.
    • ✤ Tho the Impatience of abſtaining be greater; the Pleaſure of Indulgence is really leſs. The Palls or Nauseatings which continually intervene, are of the worſt and moſt hateful kind of Senſation. Hardly is there any thing taſted which is wholly free from this ill reliſh of a ſurfeited Senſe and ruin’d Appetite.16

Noun

pall (plural palls)

  • Alternative form of pawl.

Verb

pall (third-person singular simple present palls, present participle palling, simple past and past participle palled)

  • Alternative form of pawl.

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /pɔːl/
  • (Standard Southern British, Australian, New Zealand) IPA: /poːl/
  • (US)
    • (without the cot–caught merger) IPA: /pɔl/
    • (cot–caught merger) IPA: /pɑl/
      • Audio (General American, cot–caught merger): 🔊
  • (Canada) IPA: /pɒl/
  • (Scotland) IPA: /pɔl/
  • Rhymes: -ɔːl
  • Homophone: Paul

Etymology 1

From Middle English pal, palle, from Old English pæl, pæll, from Old French paile and Latin pallium (“cloak; covering”) (and thus a doublet of pallium),1718 probably from palla (“piece of cloth worn as apparel”) (possibly from Proto-Indo-European ﹡pel- (“to cover, wrap; hide, skin; cloth”)) + -ium (suffix forming abstract nouns).

Etymology 2

From the noun pall (“cloth”).19

Etymology 3

Formed by aphesis from appal, appall (“(obsolete) to make pale; to weaken; to become weak; to lose flavour or become stale”),20 possibly under the influence of the figurative meaning of the unrelated noun pall.

Alternatively, the word may be derived from Middle English pallen (“to diminish, impair, weaken; to become faint; to lose spirit”), formed by aphesis from apallen (“to become or make faint or tired; to become indifferent; to fade or cause to fade away; to dim, weaken; to become stale; to be frightened; to frighten; to become pale”),2122 from Old French apalir (“to become or cause to become pale”), possibly from Latin pallidus (“pale, pallid; pale with fright, frightened; mouldy, musty”),23 from palleō (“to be pale, turn pale; to be anxious or fearful; to fade or change colour”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European ﹡pel-, ﹡pelH- (“grey; pale”)) + -idus (suffix meaning ‘tending to’ forming adjectives).

Etymology 4

From the verb pall (“to make vapid”).24

Etymology 5

Printed 2026-07-15.

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Footnotes

  1. 1941, Rebecca West [pseudonym; Cicily Isabel Fairfield], “Dalmatia”, in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: The Record of a Journey through Yugoslavia in 1937, volume I, London: Macmillan and Co., published 1946, →OCLC, page 153: ↩

  2. 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto IX”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 37, page 317: ↩

  3. 1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V”, in The Faerie Queene. […], part II (books IV–VI), London: […] [Richard Field] for William Ponsonby, →OCLC, stanza 24, page 246: ↩

  4. 1949 January and February, F. G. Roe, “I Saw Three Englands–1”, in Railway Magazine, page 11: ↩

  5. 1887, W. S. Gilbert, The Yeomen of the Guard, Act II: ↩

  6. 2021 May 5, Drachinifel, 42:53 from the start, in Battle of Samar - What if TF34 was there? ‎, archived from the original on 19 August 2022: ↩

  7. 1655, Thomas Fuller, “Section II. The Seventh Century.”, in The Church-history of Britain; from the Birth of Jesus Christ, untill the Year M.DC.XLVIII, London: Printed for Iohn Williams, →OCLC; The Church History of Britain, […] In Three Volumes, 3rd edition, volume I, London: Printed for Thomas Tegg, […], 1842, →OCLC, section 38 (What a Pall is), page 107: ↩

  8. 1840, [Elizabeth Stone], “Needlework of the Dark Ages”, in Countess of Wilton [i.e., Mary Margaret Stanley Egerton], editor, The Art of Needle-work, from the Earliest Ages; including Some Notices of the Ancient Historical Tapestries, 2nd edition, London: Henry Colburn, publisher, […], →OCLC, page 66: ↩

  9. c. 1606 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Macbeth”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene v], page 134, column 2, lines 48–49: ↩

  10. 1706 August 30, Francis Atterbury, A Sermon Preach’d in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul; at the Funeral of Mr. Tho. Bennet, August 30. 1706, London: Printed and sold by H. Hills, […], published 1707, →OCLC, page 4: ↩

  11. [c. 1440, Galfrido Grammatico [i.e., Geoffrey the Grammarian], “Pallyd”, in Albert Way, editor, Promptorium parvulorum sive clericorum, dictionarius Anglo–Latinus princeps, […] [Storehouse for Children or Clerics, the First English–Latin Dictionary, […]] (Camden Society; LXXXIX) (in Middle English), London: […] Societatis Camdenensis [Camden Society], published 1865, →OCLC, footnote 2, page 380: ↩

  12. 1712, [Joseph] Addison, Cato, a Tragedy (A Select Collection of English Plays; IV), Edinburgh: Printed for G. Hamilton, and J. Balfour, published 1755, →OCLC, act I, scene iv, page 15: ↩

  13. 1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 26, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1849–1850, →OCLC: ↩

  14. 1918 September–November, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “The Land That Time Forgot”, in The Blue Book Magazine, Chicago, Ill.: Story-press Corp., →OCLC; republished as chapter VI, in Hugo Gernsback, editor, Amazing Stories, part I, number 11, New York, N.Y.: Experimenter Publishing, February 1927, →OCLC, book I, page 1006, column 1: ↩

  15. 1922, Donn Byrne [i.e., Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne], “The Wake at Ardee”, in The Wind Bloweth, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC, § 4, page 74: ↩

  16. 1699, [Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury], An Inquiry Concerning Virtue: In Two Discourses, […], London: Printed for A. Bell […] E. Castle […] and S. Buckley, →OCLC; republished as “Treatise IV. Viz. An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit. […]”, in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. In Three Volumes, volume II, [London: Printed by John Darby], 1711, →OCLC, book II, part II, section II, pages 149–150: ↩

  17. “pal, n.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 19 January 2019; “pall, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, March 2005. ↩

  18. “pall”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022. ↩

  19. “pall, v.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, March 2005. ↩

  20. “pall, v.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, March 2005. ↩

  21. “pallen, v. (1)”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 19 January 2019. ↩

  22. “pall”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022. ↩

  23. “apallen, v.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 19 January 2019. ↩

  24. “† pall, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, March 2005. ↩