palest

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A form of pale — Light in color.

OriginEnglish pale ← Middle English pale ← Old French pale →
RareScrabble 8
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Meanings

adjective
  1. superlativesuperlative form of pale: most pale

    So this was my future home, I thought![…]Backed by towering hills, the but faintly discernible purple line of the French boundary off to the southwest, a sky of palest Gobelin flecked with fat, fleecy little clouds, it in truth looked a dear little city; the city of one's dreams.

    1908, W[illiam] B[lair] M[orton] Ferguson, chapter IV, in Zollenstein, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company, →OCLC
verb
  1. archaicindicativepresentsecond personsingularsecond-person singular simple present indicative of pale

    “[…] Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends’ glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself.[…]”

    1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter 36, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC

Origin

  1. Latinpallidus
  2. Old Frenchpale
  3. Middle Englishpale
  4. Englishpale
  5. Englishpalest

From pale + -est.

Full word history & related roots →

Rhymes & wordplay

Anagrams

platespastelstapleseptalStapel
Cite this entry
APA

palest. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/palest

MLA

“palest.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/palest. Accessed November 3, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “palest,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/palest.

Source: palest on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.