Palliate, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Palliated(); p. pr. & vb. n. Palliating().]
1. To cover with a mantle or cloak; to cover up; to hide. [Obs.] Being palliated with a pilgrim's coat. Sir T. Herbert.
2. To cover with excuses; to conceal the enormity of, by excuses and apologies; to extenuate; as, to palliate faults. They never hide or palliate their vices. Swift.
3. To reduce in violence; to lessen or abate; to mitigate; to ease withhout curing; as, to palliate a disease. To palliate dullness, and give time a shove. Cowper.
Syn. -- To cover; cloak; hide; extenuate; conceal. -- To Palliate, Extenuate, Cloak. These words, as here compared, are used in a figurative sense in reference to our treatment of wrong action. We cloak in order to conceal completely. We extenuate a crime when we endeavor to show that it is less than has been supposed; we palliate a crime when we endeavor to cover or conceal its enormity, at least in part. This naturally leads us to soften some of its features, and thus palliate approaches extenuate till they have become nearly or quite identical. "To palliate is not now used, though it once was, in the sense of wholly cloaking or covering over, as it might be, our sins, but in that of extenuating; to palliate our faults is not to hide them altogether, but to seek to diminish their guilt in part." Trench.
1 other Webster entry under this spelling
Palliate, a.
1. Covered with a mant [Obs.] Bp. Hall.
2. Eased; mitigated; alleviated. [Obs.] Bp. Fell.
Shades of meaning
Cloak, from the French, and palliate, from the Latin, are the same in original signification, but have diverged in meaning; a cloak may be used to hide completely the person or some object carried about the person, or it may but partly veil the figure, making the outlines less distinct; cloak is used in the former, palliate, in the latter sense; to cloak a sin is to attempt to hide it from discovery; to palliate it is to attempt to hide some part of its blameworthiness. "When we palliate our own or others' faults we do not seek to cloke them altogether, but only to extenuate the guilt of them in part." TRENCH Study of Words lect. vi, p. 266. Either to palliate or to extenuate is to admit the fault; but to extenuate is rather to apologize for the offender, while to palliate is to disguise the fault; hence, we speak of extenuating but not of palliating circumstances, since circumstances can not change the inherent wrong of an act, tho they may lessen the blameworthiness of him who does it; palliating a bad thing by giving it a mild name does not make it less evil. In reference to diseases, to palliate is really to diminish their violence, or partly to relieve the sufferer. Compare alleviate; hide.