Why are people who carry a coffin at a funeral called “pallbearers”?
It stands to reason that a pallbearer is one who bears, or carries, a pall. So what’s a pall? As we learned from Yahoo! Reference, the word comes from the Latin pallium, which refers to a cloak or covering. Thus, a pall refers to the cloth covering the coffin. A Yahoo! Image search on “coffin pall” resulted in a number of helpful illustrations. In the case of a military funeral, the pall is often a national flag. The word can also be used in a general sense to refer to anything that cloaks, shrouds, or obscures. In ecclesiastical terms, the
