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palliate

UK/ˈpælieɪt/US/ˈpælieɪt/
verbC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechToo rare in one of the two pools to compare — fewer than 20 uses in speech or in writing

To palliate is to ease suffering without curing the cause. Palliate the symptoms.

It also means to excuse a fault, which is the older sense and now the rarer one. Palliative care is built on the word and is among the most valuable medicine there is.

Definitions of palliate

  1. 1verbpalliateTo ease suffering without curing the cause.C2

    “The drug palliated the pain and did nothing else.”

palliate is an action.

Where it comes from

Late Latin palliare, to cloak, from pallium, a cloak; the sense is covering rather than removing.

  1. Latin

    palliātus

  2. Middle French

    pallier

  3. Middle English

    palliaten — To palliate (a disease), relieve the symptoms of (a patient); to extenuate (an offense); to conceal, hide

  4. English, today

    palliate

Built from

  • palliō · Latin — to cover with a cloak
  • pallium · Latin — a cloak

The verb was Middle English palliaten (“To palliate (a disease), relieve the symptoms of (a patient); to extenuate (an offense); to conceal, hide”), the adjective and participle from its participle palliat; further borrowed either from Middle French pallier or directly from Latin palliātus, of palliō (“to cover with a cloak”)), from pallium (“a cloak”), see -ate and -ate.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

palliate in the wild

  • Surgical removal or debulking is sometimes used to palliate symptoms of the mass effect even if the underlying pathology is not curable.

    Mass effect (medicine)

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.