Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

palaver

UK/pəˈlɑː.və(ɹ)/
nounC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans spokeninformal · an editor’s judgement

A palaver is a great to-do of long, empty talk. Also, in British use, any tiresome fuss about a simple thing.

The British sense is the living one, and describing a form-filling process as a right palaver is a complaint everybody understands. It carries weary humour rather than anger. The word came into English through Portuguese from Latin, and it originally meant a parley or a conference, particularly between traders and local people in West Africa. Faff is the informal British near synonym.

Definitions of palaver

  1. 1nounpalaverA tiresome fuss or long-winded business.C2

    “Getting the parcel redelivered was a complete palaver.”

Also accepted in games: fuss

Where it comes from

  1. Portuguese

    palavra

  2. English, today

    palaver

Borrowed from Portuguese palavra. Originally nautical slang, from Portuguese palavra (“word”), from Latin parabola (“parable, speech”). The term's use (especially in Africa) mimics the evolution of the word moot. As such, for sense development, see moot. a doublet of parable and parole and parabola.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 36 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

palaver in the wild

  • Kongossa may also be understood as the modern urban equivalent of traditional African palaver, a mechanism which affirms social ties through exchange of neighborhood news.

    Kongossa

  • In Africa, the palaver is a custom of meeting, and of creating or maintaining social links.

    Palaver (custom)

  • In many cases, a village has a traditional house or other place dedicated to the palaver ("palaver hut", "palaver tree", etc.).

    Palaver (custom)

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.