maypoles

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

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