Pali

//ˈpɑːli// adj, name, noun, slang

adj, name, noun, slang ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A Palestinian person. derogatory, ethnic, offensive, slur
  2. 2
    plural of palus form-of, plural
  3. 3
    an ancient Prakrit language (derived from Sanskrit) that is the scriptural and liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism wordnet
Adjective
  1. 1
    Palestinian. derogatory, ethnic, not-comparable, offensive, slur
Proper Noun
  1. 1
    A Middle Indo-Aryan language of north India, closely related to Sanskrit; the sacred language of Theravāda Buddhism.
  2. 2
    Alternative form of Bali (in Taiwan). alt-of, alternative

    "For field release trials, two C. p. fatigans breeding places (hereafter referred to as sites “A” and “B”) were selected in Pali Township, Taipei County."

  3. 3
    The Pacific Palisades coast. slang
  4. 4
    A district of Rajasthan, India.

Synonyms

All synonyms
englishlanguagepacific palisadespali language

Example

More examples

"Amongst South Asian languages, I prefer Pali, Sanskrit, and Hindi. Pali is for the study of Southern Buddhism. Sanskrit is for the study of Northern Buddhism and Hinduism. Hindi is important in India, and I wonder how good is science fiction written in Hindi. I saw the sci-fi movie Prometheus dubbed in Hindi, which was fascinating."

Etymology

Etymology 1

A learned borrowing from Sanskrit पालि (pāli).

Etymology 2

From Mandarin 八里 (Bālǐ), Wade–Giles romanization: Pa¹-li³.

Etymology 3

Clipping of Palestinian, influenced by Paki.

Etymology 4

Clipping of Palisades.

Related phrases

non-Paliindo aryan

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.