maypole
English
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Alternative forms
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]maypole (plural maypoles)
- A pole, garlanded with streamers held by people who dance around it to celebrate May Day.
- How would you like the maypole decorated?
- (idiomatic) A very tall girl or young lady.
- (ornithology) A maypole-like structure of sticks placed about a sapling in the bowers of certain species of bowerbird.
- 2005, Sean Dooley, The Big Twitch, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, page 212:
- The male Golden Bowerbird is a beautiful bird that builds one of the greatest structures in the natural world, a maypole up to three metres tall constructed of sticks and festooned with decorative clusters of flowers and lichens.
- (euphemistic) A penis, especially a large one.
- 1749, [John Cleland], “(Please specify the letter or volume)”, in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure [Fanny Hill], London: […] [Thomas Parker] for G. Fenton [i.e., Fenton and Ralph Griffiths] […], →OCLC:
- and now, disengag'd from the shirt, I saw, with wonder and surprise, what? not the play-thing of a boy, not the weapon of a man, but a maypole of so enormous a standard, that had proportions been observ'd, it must have belong'd to a young giant.
Translations
[edit]pole, garlanded with streamers held by people who dance around it to celebrate May Day
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Further reading
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Verb
[edit]maypole (third-person singular simple present maypoles, present participle maypoling, simple past and past participle maypoled)