Word.ws English Dictionary

pale-face

pale-face is the alternative form of paleface.

Meaning of paleface

Noun

paleface (plural palefaces)

  1. (derogatory, ethnic, offensive, slur) A white person, a person of European descent, particularly in Native American contexts.
    • Dere is Great Wicked Spirit, too... Heart grow hard. Great pleasure was to kill pale-face. Dat feeling last, Blossom, till I see you. Feel like fader to you, and don't want your scalp... Still want all udder pale-face scalp. Want Bourdon scalp much as any.1848, James Fenimore Cooper, chapter XXVIII, in The Bee-Hunter, or, The Oak Openings

Forms of pale-face

pluralpale-faces

Questions about pale-face

What is pale-face the alternative form of?
Pale-face is the alternative form of paleface.

Words near pale-face in the dictionary

  1. pale western cutworm
  2. pale western cutworms
  3. pale-
  4. pale-browed tinamou
  5. pale-browed tinamous
  6. pale-face
  7. pale-faced antbird
  8. pale-faced antbirds
  9. pale-faced bare-eye
  10. pale-faced bare-eyes
  11. pale-faces

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pale-face (page history and authors); paleface (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “pale-face.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pale-face. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.