pale

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun A stake or pointed stick; a picket.
• noun A fence enclosing an area.
• noun The area enclosed by a fence or boundary.
• noun A region or district lying within an imposed boundary or constituting a separate jurisdiction.
• noun The medieval dominions of the English in Ireland. Used with the.
• noun Heraldry A wide vertical band in the center of an escutcheon.
• transitive verb To enclose with pales; fence in.
• idiom (beyond the pale) Irrevocably unacceptable or unreasonable.
• adjective Whitish in complexion; pallid.
• adjective Of a low intensity of color; light.
• adjective Having high lightness and low saturation.
• adjective Of a low intensity of light; dim or faint.
• adjective Feeble; weak.
• intransitive verb To cause to turn pale.
• intransitive verb To become pale; blanch.
• intransitive verb To decrease in relative importance.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun A bakers' shovel or peel.
• noun An instrument for trying the quality of cheese; a cheese-scoop.
• To grow or turn pale; hence, to become insignificant.
• To make pale; diminish the brightness of; dim.
• noun Chaff.
• noun In botany, same as palea .
• To beat or thrash (barley), so as to detach it from the awns or chaff. See pale, n., 1.
• noun A stake; a pointed piece of wood driven into the ground, as in a fence; a picket.
• noun A fence or paling; that which incloses, fences in, or confines; hence, barrier, limits, bounds.
• noun An inclosed place; an inclosure; the inclosure of a castle.
• noun A district or region within determined bounds; hence, limits; bounds; sphere; scope.
• noun In heraldry, a broad perpendicular stripe in an escutcheon, equally distant from the two edges and usually occupying one third of it: the first and simplest kind of ordinary. When not charged, it is often represented as containing only one fifth of the field.
• noun A perpendicular stripe on cloth.
• noun In ship-building, one of the interior shores for steadying the timbers of a ship in construction.
• Of a whitish or wan appearance; lacking color; not ruddy or fresh in color or complexion; pallid; wan: as, a pale face.
• Lacking chromatic intensity, approximating to white or whitish blue or whitish violet: thus, moonlight and lilacs are pale. A red, yellow, or green may be called pale if very near white.
• Of light color as compared with others of the same sort: applied especially to certain liquors: as, pale brandy; pale sherry; pale ale.
• Synonyms Pale, Pallid, Wan, colorless. The first three words stand in the order of strength; the next degree beyond wan is ghastly, which means deathly pale. (See ghastly.) To be pale may be natural, as the pale blue of the violet; the American Indian calls the white man paleface; to be pallid or wan is a sign of ill health. Paleness may be a brief or momentary state; pallid and wan express that which is not so quickly recovered from. Pale has a wide range of application; pallid and wan apply chiefly to the human countenance, though with possible figurative extension.
• noun Paleness; pallor.
• To inclose with pales; fence.
• To inclose; encircle; encompass.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• transitive verb To inclose with pales, or as with pales; to encircle; to encompass; to fence off.
• noun A pointed stake or slat, either driven into the ground, or fastened to a rail at the top and bottom, for fencing or inclosing; a picket.
• noun That which incloses or fences in; a boundary; a limit; a fence; a palisade.
• noun A space or field having bounds or limits; a limited region or place; an inclosure; -- often used figuratively.
• noun A region within specified bounds, whether or not enclosed or demarcated.
• noun A stripe or band, as on a garment.
• noun (Her.) One of the greater ordinaries, being a broad perpendicular stripe in an escutcheon, equally distant from the two edges, and occupying one third of it.
• noun A cheese scoop.
• noun (Shipbuilding) A shore for bracing a timber before it is fastened.
• noun (Hist.) the limits or territory in Eastern Ireland within which alone the English conquerors of Ireland held dominion for a long period after their invasion of the country by Henry II in 1172. See note, below.