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).
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 ministerBenjamin Disraeli said that trial by jury is "the palladium of our liberties."
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 It has been replaced by a high rise sports facility and residence hall, still bearing the name, at New York University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).
