Word.ws English Dictionary

plain as a pikestaff

plain as a pikestaff adjective: synonym of plain as day.

Adjective

plain as a pikestaff (not comparable)

  1. (simile) Synonym of plain as day.
    • ―Don't you know he's dead? says Joe. / ―Paddy Dignam dead! says Alf. / ―Ay, says Joe. / ―Sure I'm after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as a pikestaff. / ―Who's dead? says Bob Doran. / ―You saw his ghost then, says Joe, God between us and harm.1922 February 2, James Joyce, “[Episode 12: Cyclops]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    plain as day

Synonyms of plain as a pikestaff

Origin of plain as a pikestaff

The word "pikestaff" in this expression is a corruption of packstaff (“the staff used to carry a bundle over the shoulder”).

Questions about plain as a pikestaff

What does plain as a pikestaff mean?
Plain as a pikestaff means synonym of plain as day.
What part of speech is plain as a pikestaff?
Plain as a pikestaff is an adjective.

Words near plain as a pikestaff in the dictionary

  1. plaigarism
  2. plaigiarism
  3. plain
  4. plain and simple
  5. plain as a haystack
  6. plain as a pikestaff
  7. plain as day
  8. plain as Dunstable highway
  9. plain as porridge
  10. plain as print
  11. plain as Salisbury

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: plain as a pikestaff (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-plain as a pikestaff.ogg.

Cite this entry: “plain as a pikestaff.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/plain_as_a_pikestaff. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.