Pale - pail

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Pail and pale form one of the sets of homophones listed by the then Poet Laureate Robert Bridges.
(For more, see Bridges homophones). AWE has a category listing our articles on each of these.

Do not confuse them. Both ‘pail’ and ‘pale’ are pronounced to rhyme with 'sale' and 'fail', IPA: /peɪl/.

  • A pail is a container for liquids. It has a handle, and is as large as is convenient for one person to manage with one hand. Bucket is a synonym.
  • Pale can be an adjective (with a related verb) or an (unrelated) noun.
    • The adjective pale means 'with reduced colour', or 'lighter in tone'. In winter, the sky is usually a paler blue than in summer; a person who is feeling ill, or who faints, characteristically has a pale face as the blood leaves it. Invalids in Victorian times, particularly women, were sometimes described as 'pale and interesting'.
      • The related verb, 'to pale', means 'to grow pale', 'to lose colour'. This can be used either literally ("His face paled as he heard the accusation") or figuratively, as in "All the crimes mentioned paled into insignificance beside the charge of murder."
    • The unrelated noun means 'a stick driven into the ground [as part of a fence]', 'a stake'. A pale forms part of a paling, a fence formed of vertical sticks bound together by horizontal ties or bars; and also of a palisade, a more military construction, "Chiefly Mil[itary] A strong, pointed, wooden stake fixed deeply in the ground with others in a close row, either vertical or inclined, as a defence. Obs[olete]" (OED).
      • A pale used often to be a boundary fence, as in The Pale, the boundary of the area of Ireland under firm English control between the 12th and 17th centuries (broadly, an area of some miles in diameter outside Dublin, whose precise boundaries varied over time). It is this boundary that gave rise to the expression 'beyond the Pale', meaning 'unacceptable [socially]', or, in origin, 'behaving like one of the colonized rather than one of us [the colonizers]'.
      • There were also Pales of this sort at Calais ("The English Pale") from 1347 to 1558, in Scotland (1545-9); and a "Pale of Settlement" (Russian čerta osedlosti, lit. ‘boundary of settlement’), "A set of specified provinces and districts within which Jews in Russia and Russian-occupied Poland were required to reside [alongside or with others; they were not allowed to live at all outside the Pale] between 1791 and 1917. Now hist[orical]" (OED 2005).@@;