Pal

How to spell pal

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pal

What does pal mean?

1. nounA friend or close companion.
2. verbTo associate or spend time with someone as a friend.

Pal in a sentence

• noun

  He met an old pal from school at the airport.

• verb

  The two interns began to pal around during their lunch breaks.

• noun

  My next-door neighbour has become a good pal over the years.

Where does pal come from?

Language of origin: Other

This is one of the rare everyday English words borrowed from Romani, the language of the Roma people. It comes from the Romani word 'pal', meaning 'brother' or 'mate', which itself developed from an earlier form 'phral'. That root traces all the way back to the Sanskrit 'bhratr', meaning 'brother', a word that is also the distant ancestor of the English 'brother' and the Latin 'frater'. English picked it up around the late 1600s, when it first appeared in the slang of vagrants and petty criminals before drifting into respectable casual speech as a friendly word for a companion. Its short, phonetic spelling causes no trouble; the only mild surprise is that such a homely little word carries a thread back to ancient Sanskrit.

How the word is built

• pal (whole word, from Romani for brother/mate; no prefix or suffix)