PALLID

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does pallid mean? 

• PALLID (adjective)
  The adjective PALLID has 3 senses:

1. abnormally deficient in color as suggesting physical or emotional distress

2. (of light) lacking in intensity or brightness; dim or feeble

3. lacking in vitality or interest or effectiveness

  Familiarity information: PALLID used as an adjective is uncommon.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PALLID (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Abnormally deficient in color as suggesting physical or emotional distress

Synonyms:

pale; pallid; wan

Context example:

her wan face suddenly flushed

Similar:

colorless; colourless (weak in color; not colorful)

Derivation:

pallidness (unnatural lack of color in the skin (as from bruising or sickness or emotional distress))

Sense 2

Meaning:

(of light) lacking in intensity or brightness; dim or feeble

Synonyms:

pale; pallid; sick; wan

Context example:

the wan light of dawn

Similar:

weak (wanting in physical strength)

Sense 3

Meaning:

Lacking in vitality or interest or effectiveness

Synonyms:

pale; pallid

Context example:

a pallid performance

Similar:

colorless; colourless (lacking in variety and interest)

 Context examples 

Captain Wentworth, who had caught her up, knelt with her in his arms, looking on her with a face as pallid as her own, in an agony of silence.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

It was with a feeling of personal pride that I could see a faint tinge of colour steal back into the pallid cheeks and lips.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

A very different Holmes, this active, alert man, from the introspective and pallid dreamer of Baker Street.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Strange hardships, I imagine—poor, emaciated, pallid wanderer?

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Clinical signs include impotence, intermittent claudication, diminished femoral pulses and cold, pallid lower extremities.

(Leriche Syndrome, NCI Thesaurus)

For a short space of time I remained at the window watching the pallid lightnings that played above Mont Blanc and listening to the rushing of the Arve, which pursued its noisy way beneath.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

His waxen hue became greenish-yellow by the contrast of his burning eyes, and the red scar on the forehead showed on the pallid skin like a palpitating wound.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

In each of the sisters there was one trait of the mother—and only one; the thin and pallid elder daughter had her parent's Cairngorm eye: the blooming and luxuriant younger girl had her contour of jaw and chin—perhaps a little softened, but still imparting an indescribable hardness to the countenance otherwise so voluptuous and buxom.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of these retreats in the day; but I by no means coveted a night's repose on one of those wide and heavy beds: shut in, some of them, with doors of oak; shaded, others, with wrought old English hangings crusted with thick work, portraying effigies of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human beings,—all which would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of moonlight.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)