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pal

nounverbnouncommon in dialogue

  • //pæl//

A friend, buddy, mate, cobber; someone to hang around with.

noun

  1. 1

    A friend, buddy, mate, cobber; someone to hang around with.

    Little Timmy's out playing with his pals.

    "Mob job. The Mafia has a sample of the drug for the first time, thanks to me and my pal Ng. Until now, it always self-destructed before they could get to it. So I guess they're analyzing it or something. Trying to make an antidote, maybe."

  2. 2

    An informal term of address, often used ironically in a hostile way.

    Don't you threaten me, pal – I'll report you to the police.

    Michael De Santa (Ned Luke): You forget a thousand things every day, pal. Make sure this is one of 'em.

Etymology

PIE word *bʰréh₂tēr Borrowed from Angloromani pal (“brother, friend”), from Romani phral (“brother”), from Sanskrit भ्रातृ (bhrātṛ, “brother”). Doublet of bhai, brother, bru, frater, friar, and vai.

verb

  1. 1

    Synonym of pal around.

    As an adult, she moved to New York and palled with trip-hop artist Tricky, who signed her to his own label.

    There were pictures of Garcia flashing diamond mouth grills. Spewing out a Vesuvius-amount of smoke. Showing off a riot of body tattoos. Aiming guns. Palling with superstars like Lil Wayne and Chris Brown. […]

    In the trial, they showed photographs and videos of Unsworth being congratulated by the UK prime minister, palling with Thai government officials, and smiling while Prince William pinned him with an MBE, an appointment to the Order of the British Empire.

    Greco also palled with Stone’s friend “Manhattan Madam” Kristin Davis, who was convicted of prostitution-related activities and selling prescription drugs.

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of paulAlternative form of paul (“kind of tent”).

Forms

plural
pals
past tense
palled
past participle
palled
present participle
palling
third person singular
pals
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).