tall poppy
tall poppy noun: a conspicuously successful person, especially one who attracts envious hostility.
Noun
tall poppy (plural tall poppies)
- A conspicuously successful person, especially one who attracts envious hostility.
- Like many thriving, young Australian execs, Simpson has to be wary of being construed a “tall poppy,” a cultural label placed on people who flaunt their success, based on the idea that a poppy taller than the others gets chopped down.1999 June 1, Polly Schneider, Australia Unbound, CIO, page 43
- Others have emphasised how it standardised and enforced social mores, cutting down ‘tall poppies’ and shirking those whose race, political beliefs, aspirations – or sexual proclivities – did not or could not bow to peer pressure.2003, Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality, page 240
- Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see tall, poppy.
Forms of tall poppy
| plural | tall poppies |
|---|
Origin of tall poppy
A metaphor of something conspicuous that should be lopped. First use appears c. 1710.
Words formed from tall poppy
Questions about tall poppy
- What does tall poppy mean?
- Tall poppy means a conspicuously successful person, especially one who attracts envious hostility.
- What part of speech is tall poppy?
- Tall poppy is a noun.
- What is the plural of tall poppy?
- The plural of tall poppy is tall poppies.
Words near tall poppy in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tall poppy (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-tall poppy.ogg.
Cite this entry: “tall poppy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tall_poppy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.