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pale

/peɪl/adjective, verb, noun

pale is an adjective meaning “Light in color” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled P-A-L-E and has one syllable, and it appears 12 times per million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does pale mean?

adjective

  1. 1

    Light in color.

    I have pale yellow wallpaper.

  2. 2

    Having a pallor (a light color, especially due to sickness, shock, fright etc.).

    His face turned pale after hearing about his mother's death.

  3. 3

    Feeble, faint.

    He is but a pale shadow of his former self.

verb

  1. 1

    To turn pale; to lose colour.

  2. 2

    To become insignificant.

    12 July 2012, Sam Adams, AV Club Ice Age: Continental Drift The matter of whether the world needs a fourth Ice Age movie pales beside the question of why there were three before it, but Continental Drift feels less like an extension of a th

  3. 3

    To make pale; to diminish the brightness of.

  4. 4

    To enclose with pales, or as if with pales; to encircle or encompass; to fence off.

noun

  1. 1

    A wooden stake; a picket.

  2. 2

    archaicA fence made from wooden stake; palisade.

  3. 3

    Limits, bounds (especially before of).

    But let my due feet never fail, / To walk the ſtudious cloyſters pale, / And love the high embowed roof, / With antic pillars maſſy proof, / And ſtoried windows richly dight, / Caſting a dim religious light.

  4. 4

    A vertical band down the middle of a shield.

  5. 5

    archaicThe parts of Ireland under English jurisdiction.

  6. 6

    archaicThe territory around Calais under English control (from the 14th to 16th centuries).

  7. 7

    archaicA portion of Russia in which Jews were permitted to live (the Pale of Settlement).

  8. 8

    archaicThe jurisdiction (territorial or otherwise) of an authority.

  9. 9

    obsoletePaleness; pallor.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce pale?

  • US /peɪl/

Pale has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-pale.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of pale

  • paler comparative
  • palest superlative
  • pales present, singular, he/she/it, plural
  • paling participle, present
  • paled participle, past

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is pale?

Pale appears 12 times per million words in written English, the 6,230th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Words people confuse with pale

Word pairs people search, with the monthly searches for “a vs b” (G: Google, B: Bing, United States).

pail vs pale880 G

Sounds like: pail (Wiktionary's homophone list; some hold only in some accents).

Sources: Google and Bing searches (September 2025 to August 2026, through DataForSEO); English Wiktionary (homophones, alternative spellings).

How do you abbreviate pale?

Wiktionary records one abbreviation of pale: PSE.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

Pale in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

LanguageWords
Frenchpâle, hâve (light in color), pâlir (to become pale), pal (heraldry: vertical band)
Germanhell, blass (light in color), blass werden, erblassen (to become pale), bleich, fahl (having a pallor, of human skin)
Portuguesepálido, claro (light in color), empalidecer, clarear (to become pale), pálida, branca (having a pallor, of human skin)
Spanishpálido (light in color), palidecer (to become pale), payulo, puspo, nixte (nishte) (having a pallor, of human skin), malo (feeble, faint)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does pale come from?

From Middle English pale, from Old French pale, from Latin pallidus (“pale, pallid”), from palleō (“to be pale; to grow pale; to fade”), from Proto-Indo-European *pelito-, from *pelH- (“gray”). Doublet of pallid. Displaced native Old English blāc.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).