Other forms: pallets
A pallet is the wooden platform loads are stacked on for forklifts. A pallet of bricks, stacked on pallets, pallet truck.
The standardised pallet is one of the quiet foundations of modern shipping: it lets a forklift move a tonne of anything in one action, and the standard sizes are what make warehouses and lorries fit together. Pallets are also reused endlessly in furniture-making. Note the spelling family — a pallet carries freight, a palette holds paint, a palate is in your mouth.
1nounpalletThe wooden platform loads are stacked on for forklifts.
“The forklift lifted a pallet of bottled water onto the lorry.”
2nounstrawA straw mattress, in older use.
“The prisoner slept on a thin pallet on the stone floor.”
pallet is a platform or mattress.
Anglo-Norman paillete meant a bundle of straw, from Latin palea, chaff. A pallet was first a straw mattress, and the shipping platform took the name much later.
Latin
palea — chaff
Old French
paille — straw, chaff
Anglo-Norman
paillete — bundle of straw
Middle English
paillet
English, today
pallet
From Middle English paillet, from Anglo-Norman paillete (“bundle of straw”), from Old French paille (“straw, chaff”), from Latin palea (“chaff”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA