Palm

How to spell palm

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce palm

What does palm mean?

1. nounThe inner surface of the hand between the wrist and the fingers.
2. nounA tall tropical tree with a bare trunk and a crown of large fan-shaped or feathery leaves.
3. verbTo hide a small object in the hand, often to deceive.

Palm in a sentence

• noun

  She pressed the coin into the palm of his hand.

• noun

  A single palm swayed beside the resort pool.

• verb

  The magician could palm a card without anyone noticing.

• noun

  A blister formed on the palm after an hour of digging.

• noun

  The avenue was lined with date palm trees.

• verb

  She managed to palm the spare key while no one watched.

Where does palm come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin palma, which named the flat inner surface of the hand. Because a palm tree's broad, spreading fronds look strikingly like an open hand with its fingers splayed, the Romans used the same word for the tree, and that double meaning carried straight through into English. The word arrived in Old English as palm by way of Latin, reinforced later by Old French palme during the medieval period. The classic spelling trap is the silent 'l', which survives because scribes deliberately restored it to mirror the Latin root, even though English speakers had long stopped pronouncing it. The same palma sits inside related words like 'palmistry', the reading of the hand, which keeps the link between the body part and the practice alive.

How the word is built

• palm (from Latin palma: the flat of the hand, also the palm tree whose spreading fronds resemble an open hand)