Other forms: pales, paling, paled
Pale means light and washed out in colour. A face goes pale when someone is shocked or ill — the blood drops out of it and they look grey against the pillow.
It works on any colour: pale blue walls, pale gold light at five in the afternoon, pale ale in a glass. As a verb, to pale is to lose colour, and, more common, to look small beside something bigger — last year's storm pales in comparison with this one. The near neighbours are worth sorting out: pallid is bookish, pasty is unkind, pale is the plain everyday word. Beyond the pale, meaning outside what anyone will accept, has nothing to do with colour at all — that pale is a separate old word for a fence stake. And pale describes the look of a thing, never its taste or its strength: weak tea is weak, not pale.
1adjectivepaleHaving little colour in the face, from illness, fear or shock.
“He went pale and had to sit down on the step.”
2adjectivelightLight in colour or shade.
“They painted the kitchen a pale green that changed colour in the evening.”
3verbloseTo lose colour, or to seem unimportant beside something greater.
“Last year's flood pales beside this one.”
Pale walked in from Old French, out of Latin pallidus, pale, and the verb palleō, to be pale, to fade — and back beyond that to a Proto-Indo-European root *pelH-, grey. English already had a native word for it, blāc, and pale pushed it out. Pallid is the same Latin word taken a second time, straight from the source.
Proto-Indo-European
*pelH-
Old French
pale
Middle English
pale
English, today
pale
Built from
From Middle English pale, from Old French pale. From Middle English pale, from Old French pale, from Latin pallidus (“pale, pallid”), from palleō (“to be pale; to grow pale; to fade”), from Proto-Indo-European pelito-, from pelH- (“gray”). a doublet of pallid. Displaced native blāc.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA