Word.ws English Dictionary

May-day sweeps

May-day sweeps is the plural of May-day sweep.

Meaning of May-day sweep

Noun

May-day sweep (plural May-day sweeps)

  1. (largely historical) One of the sweeps (chimney sweeps), clad in bright clothes and garlands and carrying a blackened broom, in a May Day parade.
    • The common herd of mortals invent excuses : they shuffle like a May-day sweep, and lie like the prospectus of a new Magazine.1823, New Monthly Magazine, volume 8, page 355

Questions about May-day sweeps

What is May-day sweeps the plural of?
May-day sweeps is the plural of May-day sweep.

Words near May-day sweeps in the dictionary

  1. may't
  2. may've
  3. May-bean
  4. May-beans
  5. May-day sweep
  6. May-day sweeps
  7. may-issue
  8. May-ladies
  9. May-lady
  10. may-pole
  11. may-poles

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: May-day sweeps (page history and authors); May-day sweep (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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Cite this entry: “May-day sweeps.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/may-day_sweeps. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.