From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
- Originally a palladium is a statue of Pallas Athena, especially the one that Odysseus took from the citadel of Troy, on which the city's security was believed to depend. The word is a Latinization of the Greek word παλλαδιον, which can be transliterated as "palladion".
- By a usage derived from the foregoing, a palladium is a safeguard that protects a social institution. For example, the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli said that trial by jury is "the palladium of our liberties."
- In modern scientific usage, only about two centuries old, palladium is one of the chemical elements, a metal. See palladium.
- In an even newer usage, Palladium is Microsoft's codename for their new "trusted computing" architecture, the Palladium operating system. Following numerous critical comments about the system (which Microsoft says come from misunderstanding its goals) that gave Palladium a bad name, Microsoft is changing the name of the project into "Next-generation secure computing base."
- Palladium (XPD) is one of the ISO 4217 currency codess.
- Palladium is the name of a fantasy role-playing game.
