The 2020 Hyundai Palisade will be the brand’s new flagship crossover, but what does its name mean and where does it come from? We dissect it all here…
According to Hyundai the name “references a series of coastal cliffs”. As the new crossover is the brand’s largest, and flashiest model, it also hope the name brings to mind the “Pacific Palisades, an affluent and beautiful neighborhood in Southern California.”
In the US palisade describes a “high line of cliffs” (Oxford Dictionary). Aside from the Pacific Palisades, another famous American palisade is the one that stretches from New Jersey, just across from New York City, all the way the Hudson River through to around Haverstraw in New York state, rising up to about 550ft (168m) tall.
The US usage is thought to derive from the local Lenape name, which translates to “rocks that look like rows of trees”. That name was bastardised into Weehawken, a town sitting on the Palisades across from NYC.
The definition of a palisade in Dictionary.com is “a fence of pales or stakes set firmly in the ground, as for enclosure or defense.”
The word comes from the Middle French word palissade, which itself can trace its history back to the Latin word palus for stake.
The first-generation Palisade will be launched in at the 2018 Los Angeles Auto Show. It will go on sale in the US in the summer of 2019 as a 2020 model.
