pallet

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈpælɪt/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈpælɪt/, /ˈpælət/
• (General Australian) IPA^(key): /ˈpælət/
• Rhymes: -ælɪt
• Homophones: palate, palette, pallette

From Middle English palet, from Anglo-Norman palete, from Old Norse pallr. Doublet of palette.

This etymology is incomplete. You can help Wiktionary by elaborating on the origins of this term. what does Old Norse pallr mean?

pallet (plural pallets)

1. A portable platform, usually designed to be easily moved by a forklift, on which goods can be stacked, for transport or storage.

pallet (third-person singular simple present pallets, present participle palleting, simple past and past participle palleted)

1. (transitive) To load or stack (goods) onto pallets.

From Middle English paillet, from Anglo-Norman paillete (“bundle of straw”), from Old French paille (“straw, chaff”), from Latin palea (“chaff”).

pallet (plural pallets)

1. A straw bed.
   • 1599, [Thomas] Nashe, Nashes Lenten Stuffe, […], London: […] [Thomas Judson and Valentine Simmes] for N[icholas] L[ing] and C[uthbert] B[urby] […], →OCLC, page 3:

     That good old blind bibber of Helicon I wot well, came a begging to one of the chiefe citties of Greece, & promiſed them vaſt corpulent volumes of immortallity, if they would beſtowe vpon him but a ſlender outbrothers annuity of muttõ & broth, and a pallet to ſleep on; and with deriſion they reiected him, [...]

   • 1831, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], Romance and Reality. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC, pages 222–223:

     Weary, but too anxious for sleep, Beatrice gazed round the miserable little room: the walls, from which the plaster was mouldering—the cobwebs, that for years had been gathering on the rafters of the roof—the window, or rather opening, for window there was none, but a wooden shutter, which kept creaking backwards and forwards—the floor, discoloured with dirt—the wretched pallet—all struck her with a sick shudder of loathing and misery.

2. (by extension) A makeshift bed.

From Latin palla (“to cut”), hence “a strip of cloth”.

pallet (plural pallets)

1. (heraldry) A narrow vertical stripe, narrower than a pale. Diminutive of pale.

• palet

pallet (plural pallets)

1. (painting) Archaic form of palette.
   • 1798, Robert Southey, The Pious Painter:

     The Old Dragon fled when the wonder he spied, / And cursed his own fruitless endeavor; / While the Painter call'd after his rage to deride, / Shook his pallet and brushes in triumph, and cried, / "I'll paint thee more ugly than ever!"

   • 1860, Chambers's Information for the People, volume 1, page 203:

     For example, let a painter's pallet be suspended from the thumb-hole, as in the figure […]

2. A wooden implement, often oval or round, used by potters, crucible makers, etc., for forming, beating, and rounding their works.
3. A potter's wheel.
4. (gilding) An instrument used to take up gold leaf from the pillow, and to apply it.
5. (gilding) A tool for gilding the backs of books over the bands.
6. (brickmaking) A board on which a newly moulded brick is conveyed to the hack.[1]
7. (engineering) A click or pawl for driving a ratchet wheel.
8. (engineering) One of the series of disks or pistons in the chain pump.[2]
9. (horology) One of the pieces or levers connected with the pendulum of a clock, or the balance of a watch, which receive the immediate impulse of the scape-wheel, or balance wheel.
   • 1832, Thomas Reid, Treatise on Clock and Watch Making:

     the swing wheel […] is represented as being locked by one of its teeth on the nib or detent part of the right hand pallet, and the moment when the wheel is unlocked, the tooth at the left hand pallet is ready to press forward and raise up that pallet

10. (music) In the organ, a valve between the wind chest and the mouth of a pipe or row of pipes.
11. (zoology) One of a pair of shelly plates that protect the siphon tubes of certain bivalves, such as the Teredo.
12. A cup containing three ounces, formerly used by surgeons.

• The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press
• Notes:

• L-plate, laplet, platel

From English pallet.

• IPA^(key): /ˈpɛlət/

• Audio

  (file)

• Homophone: pellet
• Rhymes: -ɛt

pallet m (plural pallets, diminutive palletje n)

1. pallet

Unadapted borrowing from English pallet.

pallet m

1. pallet

pallet

1. third-person singular present active indicative of palleō