paling

Pluralpalings

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A pointed wooden stake, one of several set upright to form a fence.

   The carpenter sharpened the top of each paling before driving it into the ground.

   Several palings had worked loose, leaving gaps in the garden fence.

   Similarpicket, stake, pale

   Note

   An old word with a Middle English form, palyng, built from pale plus -ing. Palings are counted one by one and often appear in the plural. They need not stay in a fence: Richard Flanagan's The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997) has damp eucalypt palings cladding the walls of a house. Maya Angelou, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), spells the word pailings.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A fence made up of pointed wooden stakes set upright in a row.

   A weathered paling enclosed the cottage garden on three sides.

   Children peered through the gaps in the paling at the horses beyond.

   Similarfence, palisade, fencing

   Note

   Here the word names the whole barrier rather than its parts, and it can stand in the singular. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) has "the park paling" marking a boundary. The plural can carry either meaning. When Henry James describes a square "without any palings" (1878), it lacks a fence, not just a few stakes. Context, not the form of the word, tells the fence apart from the single stake.

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of pale.

   The colors in the old photograph were slowly paling with age.

   Paling beside its flashier rivals, the once-famous brand lost its appeal.

   Note

   The -ing form serves every sense of the verb, so context has to sort them out. Used intransitively, it tracks a loss of color or of importance: a face paling with shock, a brand paling beside its rivals. Used transitively, it means draining the brightness from something. Rarest is the fencing sense, enclosing ground with pales, which sits closest to the fence stake, a noun also built from pale.

4. 4
   nounCaribbeancountable

   A boundary fence built from panels of galvanized sheet metal.

   A galvanized paling enclosed the building site to keep intruders out.

   The factory yard was ringed with a rust-streaked metal paling.

   Similarfence, hoarding

   Note

   Caribbean English kept the word when the material changed: the fence is galvanized or corrugated sheet metal rather than pointed wood. V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas (1961) has a sign painted on "a corrugated iron paling," and the ridged surface makes the lettering hard work. Outside the Caribbean, readers will picture the wooden fence, so a word naming the material, such as galvanized or corrugated, helps.

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