Word of the day: pallant
Vee and I are spending the weekend in West Sussex visiting her twin sister and brother-in-law. In the course of our time here, we’ve been over to the lovely town of Chichester where Vee and I married 31 years ago.
As we wandered round Chichester, for the first time I noticed four streets called North, South, East and West Pallant and then found that there is an important art collection at Pallant House Gallery.
I checked out the word ‘pallant’ which I had never come across before. It seems that originally it was an Anglo-Saxon word depicting a plot of land. According to this source,, in the Middle Ages the word became particular to Chichester where it refers to an area of land originally owned by the local church authorities. Then, in the 13th century, Pallant started to be used as a family name.