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When you palliate an illness, you make the pain and the other bad effects smaller, but you do not make the illness itself go away. The person is still sick; they just suffer less. Doctors and nurses use this word when they cannot cure someone, or when is not the point of the care. Palliative care is the usual name for that kind of looking-after: comfort, rest, medicine for pain, help with fear. Though actually, palliate is a little wider than “give pain medicine.” You can palliate many symptoms — sickness, tiredness, shortness of breath — as long as you are easing them, not removing the cause. In older and more formal English, people also palliate a mistake or a wrong: they cover it with soft words so it looks less serious. That second use is the same picture, throwing a cloak over something instead of taking it away. It is a formal, slightly verb. In everyday talk, people say ease, , or make it hurt less.
緩解（症狀）、減輕病痛（但不治好）。相關的「緩和醫療／安寧緩和醫療」是台灣說法；中國大陸較常說「姑息治療」。在台灣，「姑息」是縱容、太寬貸，拿來當這個字會誤導。
組成From Latin pallium, “a cloak.” The old idea is to cover something with a cloak — soften it or hide it — not to take it away. English made a verb with -ate.
同家族的字
- palliativethe usual adjective and noun from the same verb: palliative care eases suffering without curing
原始詞典資料8 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
palliateverb/ˈpælieɪt/
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To relieve the symptoms of; to ameliorate.
- And if there are some bankers out there who are still embarrassed by the size of their bonuses, then I propose that they palliate their guilt by giving to the Mayor's Fund for London to help deprived children in London.
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obsoleteTo hide or disguise.
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To cover or disguise the seriousness of (a mistake, offence etc.) by excuses and apologies.
- April 5 1628, Bishop Joseph Hall, The Blessings, Sins, and Judgments of God's Vineyard We extenuate not our guilt : whatever we sin , we condemn it as mortal : they palliate wickedness , with the fair pretence of veniality
- The young clergyman, after a few hours of privacy, was sensible that the disorder of his nerves had hurried him into an unseemly outbreak of temper, which there had been nothing in the physician's words to excuse or palliate.
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obsoleteTo lessen the severity of; to extenuate, moderate, qualify.
- "Ah, dearest!" replied he, "your spirits are exhausted,—perhaps unconsciously oppressed with the idea of that future whose pain and whose peril I have rather heightened than palliated."
- If, mindless of palliating circumstances, we are bound to regard the death of the Master-at-arms as the prisoner's deed, then does that deed constitute a capital crime whereof the penalty is a mortal one?
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To placate or mollify.
- Bradly stopped dead, too confounded to be appalled. Young Podson! Impossible! He had last seen young Podson, a bank clerk, on the seat of a pub verandah in an inland town ninety miles away, Bradly's last painting town. A noosance, young Podson, only to be palliated on a pub verandah after dinner.
- [Gordon] Brown's options for the machinery of Whitehall are constrained, as for all prime ministers, by the need to palliate allies and hug enemies close (John Reid, say).
palliateadj/ˈpælieɪt/
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obsoleteHidden, concealed.
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obsoleteraremedicinesciences(of a cure) superficial or temporary.
- All his industry and sales, did in your estate make but a palliate cure.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。