palace [ME] The Roman emperors had their imperial residence on the Palatine hill, one of the seven hills on which the city of Rome is built. In Latin the name of the hill was Palatium, which came to refer to the emperor’s home and then to any vast and luxurious building housing the powerful. Our word palace derives from this, as does Italian palazzo, a large mansion of an Italian noble family. From the 1830s lavish places of entertainment were also called palaces, as in gin palace for a gaudily decorated pub. Paladin, for a noble knight, comes from the same source: Latin palatinus ‘palace official’ became Old French paladin ‘warrior’, and was adopted into English in the late 16th century.