pallium
Pronunciation
  • (British) IPA: /ˈpalɪəm/
  • (America) IPA: /ˈpæliəm/
Noun

pallium (plural pallia)

  1. (historical) A large cloak worn by Greek philosophers and teachers. [from 10th c.]
  2. (Christianity) A woolen liturgical vestment resembling a collar and worn over the chasuble in the Western Christian liturgical tradition, conferred on archbishops by the Pope, equivalent to the Eastern Christian omophorion. [from 11th c.]
    • 2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin 2010, p. 339:
      Gregory sent Augustine a special liturgical stole, the pallium, a piece of official ecclesiastical dress borrowed from the garments worn by imperial officials.
    • 2016, Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire, Penguin 2017, p. 23:
      Wynfrith, an Anglo-Saxon monk later known as St Boniface, who was the first archbishop of Mainz and a key figure in the Empire's church history, was given cloth that had lain across St Peter's tomb as his pallium in 752.
  3. (malacology) The mantle of a mollusc. [from 19th c.]
  4. (anatomy) The cerebral cortex. [from 19th c.]
  5. (obsolete, meteorology) A sheet of cloud covering the whole sky, especially nimbostratus. [19th c.]
Related terms


This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.004
Offline English dictionary