Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A pole decorated with streamers that those celebrating May Day hold while dancing.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A pole around which the people dance in May-day festivities.
- noun An ale-stake.
- noun A tree of Jamaica, Spathelia simplex, of the order Simarubeæ.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A tall pole erected in an open place and wreathed with flowers, about which the rustic May-day sports were had.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a vertical pole or post decorated with streamers that can be held by dancers celebrating May Day
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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The dance of the Maypole is the weaving of the energies of life, male and female.
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The Maypole might be a representative of something like the World Tree from Norse myth, with which it would be consistent, or it might represent something different.
Thrimilchi (May): the early English calendar Carla 2008
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The strange story of the incongruous strangers is still remembered along that strip of the Sussex coast, where the large and quiet hotel called the Maypole and Garland looks across its own gardens to the sea.
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The truth is that the respectable hotel called the Maypole and Garland was being
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The strange story of the incongruous strangers is still remembered along that strip of the Sussex coast, where the large and quiet hotel called the Maypole and Garland looks across its own gardens to the sea.
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The truth is that the respectable hotel called the Maypole and Garland was being
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The dance was called the Maypole dance, and it had proper steps of its own, just like any other dance.
Chatterbox, 1906 Various 1873
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BRIGHT were the days at Merry Mount, when the Maypole was the banner staff of that gay colony!
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Bright were the days at Merry Mount when the Maypole was the banner-staff of that gay colony.
Twice Told Tales Nathaniel Hawthorne 1834
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In the year 1775, there stood upon the borders of Epping Forest, at a distance of about twelve miles from London -- measuring from the Standard in Cornhill, 'or rather from the spot on or near to which the Standard used to be in days of yore -- a house of public entertainment called the Maypole; which fact was demonstrated to all such travellers as could neither read nor write (and at that time a vast number both of travellers and stay-at-homes were in this condition) by the emblem reared on the roadside over against the house, which, if not of those goodly proportions that Maypoles were wont to present in olden times, was a fair young ash, thirty feet in height, and straight as any arrow that ever English yeoman drew.
Barnaby Rudge Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 1892
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