pallet

Meanings

Noun

• A portable platform, usually designed to be easily moved by a forklift, on which goods can be stacked, for transport or storage.
• A flat base for combining stores or carrying a single item to form a unit load for handling, transportation, and storage by materials handling equipment.
• (DOD only) 463L pallet – An 88” x 108” aluminum flat base used to facilitate the upload and download of aircraft.
• A straw bed.
• A makeshift bed.
• A narrow vertical stripe. .
• A wooden implement, often oval or round, used by potters, crucible makers, etc., for forming, beating, and rounding their works.
• A potter's wheel.
• An instrument used to take up gold leaf from the pillow, and to apply it.
• A tool for gilding the backs of books over the bands.
• A board on which a newly moulded brick is conveyed to the hack.
• A click or pawl for driving a ratchet wheel.
• One of the series of disks or pistons in the chain pump.
• One of the pieces or levers connected with the pendulum of a clock, or the balance of a watch, which receive the immediate impulse of the scape-wheel, or balance wheel.
• In the organ, a valve between the wind chest and the mouth of a pipe or row of pipes.
• One of a pair of shelly plates that protect the siphon tubes of certain bivalves, such as the Teredo.
• A cup containing three ounces, formerly used by surgeons.

Verb

• To load or stack (goods) onto pallets.

Origin

• From Middle English palet, from Anglo-Norman palete, from Old Norse pallr. palette.
• From Middle English paillet, from Anglo-Norman paillete ("bundle of straw"), from Old French paille ("straw, chaff"), from Latin palea ("chaff").
• From Latin palla ("to cut"), hence “a strip of cloth”.