Palisades

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A defensive barrier formed by upright wooden stakes arranged closely together serves to protect areas from invasions or encroachments
2. Historically, structures built from vertical wooden posts provide fortification and military defense against adversaries
3. A type of fence constructed of tall, pointed wooden stakes set tightly in a row ; steep natural cliffs or rock faces rising sharply along a shoreline or riverbank

Etymology: The word in front of us is a plural form, so the core story belongs to its singular, "palisade," which arrived in English by way of France. Its ancestor was the Latin "palus," meaning stake, the same root that gives English "pale" in the sense of a wooden fence post. Latin speakers in the Roman period used that word for upright posts, and it passed into the Gallo-Romance speech of Gaul, where a derived word, probably "pālīcea," described a fence of such stakes. From there the term moved into Old Occitan as "palissada," a fence of stakes, and then into Old French as "palissade." Medieval French builders used it for defensive barriers made of sharpened timbers driven upright into the ground, a sense English borrowed from Middle French as "palissade." The suffix "-ade," shared by many French words, marks a collection or structure built from the base, so the whole word means something like "a structure of stakes."

Synonyms: fences, barriers, enclosures