Word Confusion: Vail vs Vale vs Veil

Plural for the noun: vails
Gerund: vailing

Third person present verb: vails
Past tense or past participle: vailed
Present participle: vailing

Alternative spelling: vale [noun], veil [noun & verb]

Plural for the noun: vales

Plural for the noun: veils
Gerund: veiling

Third person present verb: veils
Past tense or past participle: veiled
Present participle: veiling

• [Usually in the plural] Gratuity
• Money given to servants by visitors

Avails

• Profit
• Return
• Proceeds

An unexpected gain or acquisition

• A casual advantage or benefit
• A windfall

Noun, proper:
A ski resort in Colorado ²

Verb, intransitive:
To be of use or profit ¹

• Avail

To descend ³

• Lower

To doff one’s hat

Verb, transitive:
To be of use or profit ¹

• Avail

To lower (a banner, for example) ³

To doff (one’s hat) as a token of respect or submission

Noun:
[Used in place names or as a poetic term] A valley ¹

The world, mortal, or earthly life

[Archaic; literary] A written or spoken farewell ²

• Goodbye
• The world regarded as a scene of trouble or sorrow

[Archaic] Gratuity

• Tipping one’s hat

• A piece of fabric forming part of a nun’s headdress, resting on the head and shoulders
• [In Jewish antiquity] The piece of precious cloth separating the sanctuary from the body of the Temple or the Tabernacle
• Any piece of cloth used as a concealing or separating screen or curtain

A thing that serves to cover, conceal, or disguise

[Botany] A membrane which is attached to the immature fruiting body of some toadstools and ruptures in the course of development, either (universal veil) enclosing the whole fruiting body or (partial veil) joining the edges of the cap to the stalk

[Dialectal; Scottish & Northern English; anatomy] Caul

[Religious] Vestment worn by a priest at High Mass in the Roman Catholic Church

• A silk shawl

Verb, intransitive:
To don or wear a veil

Verb, transitive:
To cover or conceal with or as with a veil

Cover, conceal, or disguise

“My house is as ’twere the cave where the young outlaw hoards the stolen vails of his occupation.” – Chapman

Noun, proper:
The Smiths are going skiing at the Vail ski resort in Colorado.

Vail, Colorado, has an elevation of 8,150 feet.

Verb, intransitive:
When the flag is vailed on Remembrance Day, it is not considered as a desecration.

Crowned heads vailed before the statue of Beethoven, doing homage to the royalty of genius.

“Thy convenience must vail to thy neighbor’s necessity.” – South

Verb, transitive:
You should vail the flag because our former governor just died.

He vailed his hat as the funeral procession slid by.

Turning himself towards the noblemen that sat on a form placed before the scaffold, he vailed his hat.

He should vail himself of those opportunities.

Vale, my friend.

Noun:
He left the Vale of Glamorgan.

“Out in the country, in the villages of the moors, dales, and vales where most of these photographs were taken, little seemed to have changed since before the war,” he writes.

For hundreds of years they have worked the dales, the vales, the moors, and the rest of Yorkshire’s countryside and molded it into the scenery we admire so much today.

They hadn’t asked to come into this vale of tears.

The world is the theater of God’s activity and a place of soul-making rather than simply an unhappy vale of tears.

What favor was it to other souls to bring them into this vale of tears?

And a warm vale to the Cardinal, who died on Sunday.

They’re holding a vale for his sister on Friday.

Helen’s sister took the veil.

A veil of mist and snow lay over the landscape.

The venture is surrounded in a veil of secrecy.

The veil “[shields] a holy God from sinful man” (Holy).

The thick draperies veiled the view from inside.

Billy realized that his father had passed irrevocably beyond the veil.

I will draw a veil over the cheerless days that followed.

“The bottom half of a membranous universal veil is often left behind at the base of the mushroom’s stalk, forming a sort of a cup that the mushroom seems to be growing out of” (Volva).

The veil should then be slowly peeled from the face to avoid any damage.

Father Martin donned the humeral veil before he walked out to celebrate Mass.

Wait! I forgot my belly dancing veil!

Verb, intransitive:
In some societies, women are expected to be veiled when they go out in public.

In certain Islamic countries women must veil.

Verb, transitive:
She veiled her face.

Cold mists veiled the mountain peaks.

He wasn’t able to veil his disappointment.

The development of these technologies has been veiled in secrecy.

1. 1250–1300; Middle English aphetic variant of avail.
2. The pass was named after Charles Vail, the highway engineer who routed U.S. Highway 6 through the Eagle Valley in 1940.
3. Middle English, originally in the sense lower (one’s eyes, weapon, banner, etc., as a sign of submission), is a shortening of the obsolete avale, from the Old French avaler meaning to lower, from a val meaning down, literally in the valley.

1. Middle English from the Old French val, which is from the Latin vallis, valles.
2. Latin, literally be well!, be strong!, an imperative of valere.