Originally, a palladium is a statue of anyone called Pallas. The word later assumed a variety of other meanings. The word is a Latinization of the Greek word παλλαδιον, which can be transliterated as "palladion". See also Pallas (disambiguation).

• See Palladium (mythology). In particular:
  • The Palladium is the statue that Athena erected of Pallas, daughter of Triton.
  • A palladium is a cult figure of Pallas Athena, especially the one that wily Odysseus stole from the citadel of Troy, on which the city's security was believed to depend.

• 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."

• Palladium is one of the chemical elements, a metal, discovered in 1803 and named by its discoverer, Wollaston, after the recently discovered asteroid, 2 Pallas.

• The Hollywood Palladium is a theater on the Sunset Strip that opened in 1940.
• The London Palladium, which opened in 1910 as a Music Hall, is a grand theater in the West End, and was bought by Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber at the end of 1990. Many theaters in smaller U.K. cities are named "the Palladium" to catch a little of its legendary glamour. According to Brewer, the theatre was named based on a mistaken notion that the ancient Palladium was a sort of colosseum.

• In New York City in 1947 the mambo craze began at the Palladium Ballroom at Broadway and 53rd, which had been a swing-era venue with a giant dance floor and introduced the cha-cha-cha in 1954. Downtown, in the early 1980s a disco on East 14th Street that bore the same name was a stop on tours of U2 and Ozzy Osbourne and home to classic house music; it was the last public use of Oscar Hammerstein I's Opera House on East 14th Street. It has been replaced by a high rise sports facility and residence hall, still bearing the name, at New York University

• 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 that gave Palladium a bad name (which Microsoft says come from misunderstanding its goals), Microsoft changed the name of the project to Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB).

• Palladium (XPD) is one of the ISO 4217 currency codes.

• Palladium is a fantasy role-playing game created by Palladium Books.

• The Palladium is the original name of a sports arena in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada now known as the Corel Centre.

• The Palladian style of architecture was the creation of Andrea Palladio and is not related to palladium.