paleface
paleface noun: a white person, a person of European descent, particularly in Native American contexts.
Noun (1)
paleface (plural palefaces)
- 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
- The hearts of the palefaces would not thrill to these superstitions of the red men, though we spoke of them in the centre of the haunted region.1889, Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Sketches from Memory”, in The Great Stone Face and Other Tales of the White Mountains
Noun (2) capitalized: Paleface
Paleface (plural Palefaces)
- Alternative letter-case form of paleface.
Examples of paleface in a sentence
- You know how an Indian is—the palefaces fixed his clock when they introduced him to firewater.1909, O. Henry [pseudonym; William Sydney Porter], “He Also Serves”, in Options:
- Some Blackfeet Indians, with a taste and a respect for Nature that shames the paleface, have protested to the Secretary of the Interior[…]1916 March 11, “Silly Place-Names”, in Saturday Evening Post:
- Speed is whitey's drug, from the palefaces who cook it to the Caspers who deal it to the ofay vanilla wafers who snort or spike it.1998, Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto, page 128:
Synonyms of paleface
30 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Forms of paleface
| plural | palefaces |
|---|---|
| alternative form | Paleface |
| alternative form | pale face |
| alternative form | pale-face |
| plural | Palefaces |
Origin of paleface
From pale + face, a supposed calque from a Native American language. First appears in print c. 1797.
Questions about paleface
- What does paleface mean?
- Paleface means a white person, a person of European descent, particularly in Native American contexts.
- How do you use paleface in a sentence?
- You know how an Indian is—the palefaces fixed his clock when they introduced him to firewater.
- What part of speech is paleface?
- Paleface is a noun.
- What is the plural of paleface?
- The plural of paleface is palefaces.
Words near paleface in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: paleface (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.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-paleface.ogg.
Cite this entry: “paleface.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/paleface. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.