Word.ws English Dictionary

tail-pole

tail-pole noun: a wooden pole, usually fifteen to twenty-five long and nine inches in diameter, used to rotate a windmill into the wind.

Noun

tail-pole (plural tail-poles)

  1. A wooden pole, usually fifteen to twenty-five long and nine inches in diameter, used to rotate a windmill into the wind.
    • Old post-mills were turned or 'luffed' into the wind by a pole variously called the tail-pole, tail-beam, turning-beam, or tiller-beam.2011, Stanley Freese, Windmills and Millwrighting, Cambridge University Press, page 40
    • For a long time the turning was done manually, simply by pushing on a long tail-pole extending downwards, almost to the ground, from the rotatable superstructure.1960, Thomas Kingston Derry, Trevor Illtyd Williams, A Short History of Technology from the Earliest Times to A.D. 1900, Courier Corporation, page 256

Synonyms of tail-pole

Forms of tail-pole

pluraltail-poles
alternative formtail pole
alternative formtailpole

Origin of tail-pole

From tail + pole.

Questions about tail-pole

What does tail-pole mean?
Tail-pole means a wooden pole, usually fifteen to twenty-five long and nine inches in diameter, used to rotate a windmill into the wind.
What part of speech is tail-pole?
Tail-pole is a noun.
What is the plural of tail-pole?
The plural of tail-pole is tail-poles.

Words near tail-pole in the dictionary

  1. tail-napkins
  2. tail-off
  3. tail-offs
  4. tail-pod radish
  5. tail-pod radishes
  6. tail-pole
  7. tail-poles
  8. tail-risk
  9. tail-risks
  10. tail-shedding
  11. tail-sheddings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tail-pole (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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