palate
Pluralpalates
Verbpalates, palating, palated
Often confused with palette and pallet
Pluralpalates
Formspalates, palating, palated
- 1The roof of the mouth in vertebrates, the partition that separates the mouth cavity from the nasal cavity.
The surgeon repaired the gap in the child's palate before her first birthday.
A sip of scalding coffee left a blister on his palate that stung for days.
Note
The anatomist's sense, and the one the word arrived with: Latin palātum, perhaps of Etruscan origin, already meant the roof of the mouth before Middle English passed it on. The word's other uses lean on it. the invertebrate mouthpart is named for its likeness to this structure, and a taster's palate shifts the word from the roof of the mouth to the judgment of flavor.
- 2A person's ability to tell different flavors apart and to appreciate them.
She has an unusually refined palate and can name every herb in a sauce.
The judges' palates were tested with twenty olive oils in a single morning.
Similartaste
Note
The everyday figurative sense, in which the roof of the mouth stands for the whole skill of tasting. Palates are refined, educated or jaded, and Alexander Pope already found it a hard task to hit the palate of demanding guests. Keep the spelling apart from palette, the painter's board, and pallet, the wooden platform: all three sound the same.
- 3
- 4A relish of the mind; a liking or natural affinity for something.
The producers softened the ending to suit the palate of a mainstream audience.
Satire this sharp may be too strong for some palates.
Note
Taste moves from the tongue to the mind: a book, a joke or a policy can suit or offend someone's palate. Thomas Baker in 1656 already writes of plays meant to entertain the palates of Nobles. The plural is common when a whole audience is meant, as in too strong for some palates.
- 5To relish something, or to find it palatable.
Many viewers could not palate the show's sudden change in tone.
Some longtime customers found the price increase hard to palate.
Similarstomach
Note
As a verb, palate is nonstandard, and many readers will take it for a slip. Its history is long, though: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602) has a character not palating the taste of her dishonour, and it still turns up in hard to palate. In careful writing, stomach or find palatable is the safer choice.
- 6In insects, the mouthpart called the hypopharynx.
The diagram labels the palate of the grasshopper alongside the jaws and other mouthparts.
The student dissected the beetle carefully to expose its palate.
Note
Entomologists rarely use the word this way. The hypopharynx is a tongue-like lobe rising from the floor of an insect's mouth, near where the salivary duct opens, and in current descriptions of mouthparts hypopharynx is the term to use; palate in this sense mostly belongs to older texts and diagrams.
- 7In certain invertebrates, a part of the mouth that roughly corresponds to the roof of the mouth in vertebrates.
- 8In certain two-lipped flowers, such as the snapdragon, a bulge that projects into the throat of the flower.
- 9The roof of an animal's mouth, prepared and eaten as food.
I remember, when he was in Scotland, his praising ‘Gordon's palates’ (a dish of palates at the Honourable Alexander Gordon's) with a warmth of expression which might have done for honour to more important subjects.
1791, James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson
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Origin
From Middle English palate, from Latin palātum ("roof of the mouth, palate"), which is perhaps of Etruscan origin.