Definition
nounOriginally, a stick; now specifically, a long and slender piece of metal or (especially) wood, used for various construction or support purposes.
nounA construction by which an animal is harnessed to a carriage.
Sentence Examples
The engineer climbed the telephone pole.
We credit Peary with having discovered the North Pole.
Even after it was hit, the pole was still upright.
Word Origin & History
From Middle English pole, pal, from Old English pāl (“a pole, stake, post; a kind of hoe or spade”), from Proto-West Germanic *pāl (“pole”), from Latin pālus (“stake, pale, prop, stay”), perhaps from Old Latin *paxlos, from Proto-Italic *pākslos, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *peh₂ǵ- (“to nail, fasten”). Doublet of peel, pale, and palus.
Cognates
Cognate with Scots pale, paill (“stake, pale”), North Frisian pul, pil (“stake, pale”), Saterland Frisian Pool (“pole”), West Frisian poal (“pole”), Dutch paal (“pole”), German Pfahl (“pile, stake, post, pole”), Danish pæl (“pole”), Swedish påle (“pole”), Icelandic páll (“hoe, spade, pale”), Old English fæc (“space of time, while, division, interval; lustrum”).
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"For a spell we done pretty well. Then there came a reg'lar terror of a sou'wester same as you don't get one summer in a thousand, and blowed the shanty flat and ripped about half of the weir poles out of the sand."
— 1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter I, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC:
"There she was, walking around with an IV pole, and we were only told that "Mommy isn't feeling so well, so she has to be connected to a special soda.""
— 2019, Abby Chava Stein, Becoming Eve, Seal Press, page 26:
"Long had poled the ball into the lower deck in right center."
— 2007, Tony Silvia, Baseball Over the Air:
"Genuine music is the offspring of profound emotion: of exaltation, pain, or joy. Music produced outside of a situation between these poles of the human heart is of banal character, bloodless, watery."
— 1929, Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, Jewish Music: Its Historical Development, page 194:
"And the slope sun his upward beam / Shoots against the dusky pole,"
— 1634 October 9 (first performance; Gregorian calendar), [John Milton], edited by H[enry] Lawes, A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634: […] [Comus], London: […] [Augustine Matthews] for Hvmphrey Robinson, […], published 1637, →OCLC; reprinted as Comus: […] (Dodd, Mead & Company’s Facsimile Reprints of Rare Books; Literature Series; no. I), New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1903, →OCLC: