palace
/ˈpalɪs
/- Officials charged with running the various royal palaces and residences have nothing to match this.
- They are big by our standards today, but in Medieval England they were bigger than all buildings including royal palaces.
- He was unlikely to be anywhere near his official palaces, which have been hit repeatedly in almost three weeks of air strikes.
Synonyms
- The palace did bring entertainment to south east London but not generally for the masses.
- Meanwhile, BAC transforms itself into a holiday resort, complete with beaches, museums and palaces.
Origin
Middle English: from Old French paleis, from Latin Palatium, the name of the Palatine hill in Rome, where the house of the emperor was situated.
The Roman emperors had their imperial residence on the Palatine hill, one of the seven hills on which the city of Rome is built. In Latin the name of the hill was Palatium, which came to refer to the emperor's home and then to any vast and luxurious building housing the powerful. Our word palace derives from this, as does Italian palazzo, a large mansion of an Italian noble family. From the 1830s lavish places of entertainment were also called palaces, as in gin palace for a gaudily decorated pub. Paladin, for a noble knight, comes from the same source: Latin palatinus ‘palace official’ became Old French paladin ‘warrior’, and was adopted into English in the late 16th century.