Palette

How to spell palette

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce palette

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does palette mean?

1. nounA thin board, often oval, on which a painter lays out and mixes colours.
2. nounThe particular range or set of colours used by an artist, designer, or in a piece of work.

Palette in a sentence

• The painter squeezed dabs of oil paint around the edge of her wooden palette.

• The interior designer chose a muted palette of greys and soft blues for the office.

• He wiped the dried acrylic off his palette with a cloth before starting the portrait.

• The website redesign used a warmer palette to make the brand feel friendlier.

Where does palette come from?

Language of origin: French

This word came into English from French in the 1620s, where palette was a diminutive of pale, meaning a flat blade or shovel. That French word traces back to the Latin pala, which literally meant a spade or a baker's flat shovel for moving bread in an oven. The diminutive ending, the same -ette that gives us words like cigarette and kitchenette, marked it as a small flat blade, and that is exactly what an artist's thin, flat mixing board resembles. From the physical board the sense widened to mean the particular range of colours an artist habitually uses, and later still any coordinated set of colours in design or decoration. The doubled meaning is also why palette is so easily confused with its homophone partners pallet (a wooden shipping platform or a straw bed) and palate (the roof of the mouth), even though all three trace to quite different roots.

How the word is built

• pal- (from Latin pala: spade or blade)
• -ette (French diminutive suffix: little)

Words that sound like palette

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• palate: The roof of the mouth, made up of a bony hard section at the front and a soft section at the back.
• pallet: A flat wooden or plastic platform on which goods are stacked for storage and moving by forklift.