Definition of "pale" in Anglais

adjective

1. Light in color.

   • I have pale yellow wallpaper.
   • She had pale skin because she didn't get much sunlight.
   • She turned pale and screamed on seeing the spider in the toilet.

2. (of human skin) Having a pallor (a light color, especially due to sickness, shock, fright etc.).

   • His face turned pale after hearing about his mother's death.

3. Feeble, faint.

   • He is but a pale shadow of his former self.
   • The son's clumsy paintings are a pale imitation of his father's.

verb

1. (intransitive) To turn pale; to lose colour.

2. (intransitive) To become insignificant.

   • 12 July 2012, Sam Adams, AV Club Ice Age: Continental Drift The matter of whether the world needs a fourth Ice Age movie pales beside the question of why there were three before it, but Continental Drift feels less like an extension of a theatrical franchise than an episode of a middling TV cartoon, lolling around on territory that’s already been settled.

3. (transitive) To make pale; to diminish the brightness of.

noun

1. (obsolete) Paleness; pallor.

noun

1. A wooden stake; a picket.

   • 1707, John Mortimer, The Whole Art of Husbandry, London: H. Mortlock & J. Robinson, 2nd edition, 1708, Chapter 1, pp. 11-12, […] if you deſign it a Fence to keep in Deer, at every eight or ten Foot diſtance, ſet a Poſt with a Mortice in it to ſtand a little ſloping over the ſide of the Bank about two Foot high; and into the Mortices put a Rail […] and no Deer will go over it, nor can they creep through it, as they do often, when a Pale tumbles down.

2. (archaic) A fence made from wooden stake; palisade.

3. (by extension) Limits, bounds (especially before of).

   • But let my due feet never fail, / To walk the ſtudious cloyſters pale, / And love the high embowed roof, / With antic pillars maſſy proof, / And ſtoried windows richly dight, / Caſting a dim religious light.

4. (heraldry) A vertical band down the middle of a shield.

5. (archaic) A territory or defensive area within a specific boundary or under a given jurisdiction.

6. (archaic) The jurisdiction (territorial or otherwise) of an authority.

7. A cheese scoop.

verb

1. To enclose with pales, or as if with pales; to encircle or encompass; to fence off.