palette
Pluralpalettes
Often confused with palate and pallet
- 1A thin board that a painter uses to set out and mix paints.
He mixed a muddy green on his palette and dabbed it onto the canvas.
Dried paint had built up in thick ridges around the edge of the old palette.
Note
The painter's board came into English from French palette, and it is a doublet of pallet: one source word that took two paths into English and came out with two spellings, each keeping its own meanings. In writing they are not interchangeable, so the board for mixing paint, and every color sense that grew from it, is always spelled palette.
- 2A set of colors available for use or for mixing.
The paint company offers a palette of forty exterior shades.
For this exercise, students may work only from a limited palette of red, yellow, blue and white.
Similarrange
- 3A selection of makeup shades, such as eyeshadows, often sold together in one tray.
The holiday palette includes twelve eyeshadows and two highlighters.
She dipped her brush into the palette and swept a soft bronze across her eyelids.
- 4The range of colors used in a particular work or item, or across a body of work.
Her later paintings shift to a darker palette of browns and deep reds.
The brand keeps the same color palette of navy and gold in every store.
Similarrange
- 5In a graphical interface, an on-screen selection of colors, tools, commands or similar items for the user to pick from.
The layers palette lets you hide, lock or reorder parts of an image.
Designers can dock the command palette beside the drawing area.
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Note
In interface design a palette is usually a small panel kept apart from the main document window, floating above it or docked to one edge, so that frequently used tools stay within reach. Programs name each one by what it holds: a tool palette in a drafting program, a color palette in a paint program, a layers palette in an image editor.
- 6In music, the variety of tones and tone colors a composer or performer draws on in a particular work or performance.
The score's orchestral palette leans on low brass and muted strings.
The quartet's palette stretched from whispery harmonics to rich, full chords.
- 7A plate that a person presses their chest against to put force behind a hand-operated drill.
Leaning hard against the palette, the shipwright bored a hole through the oak plank.
The breast drill in the museum still has its worn wooden palette.
- 8A plate of armor covering the joint at the bend of the shoulder or of the elbow.
A small steel palette protected the gap where the arm met the shoulder.
The armorer riveted a new palette over the elbow joint of the suit.
Note
A word from the age of plate armor, met today in museums and histories of arms rather than in everyday speech. The bend of the shoulder and of the elbow had to stay free to move, and the palette was the small plate that guarded that opening between the larger pieces, where a blade might otherwise find a gap.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of palette apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
Borrowed from French palette; it is a doublet of pallet, the two words sharing the same source.