pallet
Pluralpallets
Verbpallets, palleting, palleted
Often confused with palate and palette
Pluralpallets
Formspallets, palleting, palleted
- 1A flat platform for stacking goods so they can be moved or stored, often with a forklift.
The store got a pallet of new TVs this morning.
Workers stacked boxes on wooden pallets in the back room.
Similarskid
- 2To pile goods onto flat platforms called pallets.
We need to pallet these boxes before the truck comes.
She palleted the bags of rice and wrapped them in plastic.
Similarpalletize
- 3A simple bed made quickly from whatever you can find.
We made a pallet of pillows and quilts for the kids at the sleepover.
After the storm, families slept on pallets of blankets in the school gym.
- 4A bed made of straw.
The old farmer slept on a straw pallet in the barn.
Each night the boy filled his pallet with fresh straw.
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- 5One of the small levers, joined to a clock's pendulum or a watch's balance, that a toothed wheel pushes.
The clock stopped because one pallet was bent.
The repairman oiled the tiny pallets inside the watch.
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- 6A wooden tool, often round or oval, that potters and other makers use to shape and beat their work.
She tapped the clay pot with a wooden pallet to make it round.
The potter keeps several pallets of different sizes on his bench.
- 7In an organ, a flap that opens to let air from the wind chest into the pipes.
A stuck pallet made one organ pipe keep playing.
Pressing a key opens a pallet, and the pipe begins to sound.
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- 8A small catch that pushes a toothed wheel to make it turn.
The pallet pushes the ratchet wheel each time you pull the handle.
The mechanic fitted a new pallet so the toothed wheel would turn again.
Similarpawl
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- 9A thin up-and-down stripe on a coat of arms, thinner than the stripe called a pale.
The coat of arms on the gate has a thin gold pallet down the middle.
The knight's shield was painted with three blue pallets.
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- 10A tool for picking up very thin gold leaf from a cushion and putting it on something.
The gilder used a pallet to lift the gold leaf and lay it on the frame.
The gold is so thin that she picks it up with a pallet, not her fingers.
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- 11Archaic form of palette. It is an old spelling for the board an artist mixes paint on.
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- 12A tool used to add gold to the back of a book, over the ridges called bands.
The bookbinder used a hot pallet to put gold lines on the back of the book.
She pressed the pallet across each band on the spine.
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- 13A board used to carry a newly shaped brick to the place where it dries.
He slid the soft new brick onto a pallet and carried it out to dry.
The workers carried the wet bricks on pallets to the drying rows.
- 14One of the round pieces on the chain of a chain pump that move the water.
One pallet on the chain was broken, so the pump stopped working well.
The farmer turned the handle, and the pallets carried water up the wooden pipe.
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- 15One of two small hard plates that guard the water tubes of some clams, such as the shipworm.
When the shipworm pulls its tubes in, a hard pallet on each side helps guard them.
Scientists can tell one shipworm from another by looking at its pallets.
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- 16A small cup holding three ounces, once used in Paris to measure blood taken from a sick person.
The doctor took enough blood from the patient to fill one pallet.
The surgeon wrote down how many pallets of blood he had taken.
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Showing meanings only.
Practice
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Origins
From an old French word for a bundle of straw, which comes from the Latin word for chaff.
Said to come from an old French word, going back to a Latin word for a strip of cloth.
Taken from the French word palette.