Pallet

How to spell pallet

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pallet

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pallet mean?

1. nounA flat wooden or plastic platform on which goods are stacked for storage and moving by forklift.

Pallet in a sentence

• The forklift lifted each loaded pallet onto the lorry.

• The warehouse stored thousands of bricks on every pallet.

Where does pallet come from?

Language of origin: French

Pallet is an odd word because two separate strands of history landed on the same spelling. The older 'bed' sense came into English in the 1400s from the Old French paillet, a little bundle of straw, built on paille 'straw', which in turn descends from the Latin palea, meaning 'chaff' or 'straw'. The later 'flat platform' sense comes instead from the French palette, a diminutive of pale, meaning a flat blade or shovel, from the Latin pala, a 'spade'. That second strand is also the source of the artist's palette, which is why pallet, palette and palate are such a tangled trio of homophones in writing. The shipping sense exploded in the twentieth century with mechanised warehouses and forklift trucks, even though the word itself is far older. The plain -et ending and the doubled l are the safest features to fix in memory, since they separate the wooden platform from the painter's palette and the mouth's palate.

How the word is built

• pall- (from French, either paille 'straw' or pale/pala 'blade, spade')
• -et (diminutive suffix)

Words that sound like pallet

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.
• palette: A thin board, often oval, on which a painter lays out and mixes colours.