Word.ws English Dictionary

bare poles

bare poles noun: the condition of a sailing boat when all of its sails have been taken in.

bare poles: the condition of a sailing boat when all of its sails have been taken in
Image: Willem Van de Velde, the Younger, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

bare poles (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic) The condition of a sailing boat when all of its sails have been taken in.

Questions about bare poles

What does bare poles mean?
Bare poles means the condition of a sailing boat when all of its sails have been taken in.
What part of speech is bare poles?
Bare poles is a noun.

Words near bare poles in the dictionary

  1. bare one's heart
  2. bare one's soul
  3. bare one's teeth
  4. bare patch
  5. bare patches
  6. bare poles
  7. bare trust
  8. bare trusts
  9. bare with
  10. Bare'e
  11. bare-arse

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bare poles (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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