Make Your Point > Archived Issues > PALETTE
Send Make Your Point issues straight to your inbox.
I like to place the lovely word palette next to gamut, spectrum, and panoply. All four can mean "a full set, a certain range," each with its own visual connotation.
Our word "palette" traces back through French to the Latin pala, "a spade, or a shoulder blade."
(Source)
Part of speech:
Pick the lovely, common word "palette" when you want to talk literally about groups of colors. You might describe the bright, light, murky, dark, neutral, rainbow, earth tone, pastel, or gemstone palette of some particular outfit, room, makeup look, or other work of art. "I love the intense palette used on the album cover for Fiona Apple's The Idler Wheel." "I love the neon rainbow palette that these scientists used when mapping a bit of a mouse's brain."
"I followed the swift movements of her hand as she moved the brush from palette to paper and then back again."
Explain the meaning of "palette" without saying "selection of things for creating" or "range of things to use."
Fill in the blanks: "(Someone or something) offered a new palette of (some kind of) possibilities."
Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.
1.
Something created WITHOUT a palette might be described as
|