Pale

How to spell pale

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pale

What does pale mean?

1. adjectiveLight in colour or shade; lacking strong or deep colour, often said of skin that looks drained.
2. verbTo seem less important or impressive when compared with something else.

Pale in a sentence

• adjective

  She looked pale and tired after the long night shift.

• verb

  Last year's profits pale beside this quarter's record figures.

• adjective

  They painted the nursery a pale shade of blue.

• verb

  Her earlier worries seem to pale next to the current crisis.

Where does pale come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The adjective pale arrived in English in the early 1300s from the Old French paile or pale, which descended from the Latin pallidus, meaning 'wan' or 'colourless', built on the verb pallere, 'to be pale'. The original sense was simply lacking in strong colour, whether of a face drained of blood or of a faint, washed-out shade. Quite separately, English also has a noun pale meaning a pointed stake or, by extension, a fenced-in territory; that one comes from the Latin palus, 'a stake', and gives us the phrase 'beyond the pale', literally outside the marked boundary. The two words look and sound identical but reached English by different routes, the adjective from a word for colour and the noun from a word for a post. The shared spelling, and the fact that pale sounds exactly like the bucket word pail, makes it a tidy little trap.

How the word is built

• pale (from Latin pallidus: pallid, wan); no affixes in the modern form