Word.ws English Dictionary

may-pole

may-pole is the alternative form of maypole.

Meaning of maypole

Noun

maypole (plural maypoles)

  1. A pole, garlanded with streamers held by people who dance around it to celebrate May Day.
    • How would you like the maypole decorated?
  2. (idiomatic) A very tall girl or young lady.
  3. A maypole-like structure of sticks placed about a sapling in the bowers of certain species of bowerbird.
    • 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.2005, Sean Dooley, The Big Twitch, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, page 212
  4. (euphemistic) A penis, especially a large one.
    • 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.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

See all 11 meanings of maypole

Forms of may-pole

pluralmay-poles

Questions about may-pole

What is may-pole the alternative form of?
May-pole is the alternative form of maypole.

Words near may-pole in the dictionary

  1. May-day sweep
  2. May-day sweeps
  3. may-issue
  4. May-ladies
  5. May-lady
  6. may-pole
  7. may-poles
  8. May-September romance
  9. May-September romances
  10. May-Thurner syndrome
  11. May-to-December

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: may-pole (page history and authors); maypole (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-pole.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/may-pole. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.