🧍 A thin person 🌱 A plant support

beanpole

5.3

A long thin pole put in the ground to help bean plants climb

noun
/ˈbiːnˌpoʊl/

Informal

: tutor

In the garden, they constructed beanpoles to support the climbing vines as they grew towards the sun.

Examples

At last she found Alice trying to drive a beanpole firmly into the gravelly soil of the residents' garden.

Fiction book (1990)
Last Son has been here and put in a shift to clear away the dreaded knotweed all along the creek (we will use it for beanpoles and kindling), so the sun (and our fingers) can get to the berries.

Blog text (27)
He was so tall and thin that his friends often joked he looked like a beanpole.
As she walked through the crowd, she was easily spotted because she resembled a beanpole among shorter people.

Synonyms

string bean

vsbeanpole

Slang

1 6.4

A very tall thin person that people call as a joke

is a neutral term that also names a garden support pole

hop pole

vsbeanpole

8.4

A tall pole that holds wires for climbing plants used to make beer

is a pole used for supporting climbing vegetable plants in gardens

How Tall

to tower

72 4.6

mast

49 4.2

beanpole

Informal

5.3

pole

318 1.0

stake

167 4.8

stick

686 1.0

Surface Forms

beanpole singular

beanpoles plural

Morphology

beanpole = bean + pole (semi-transparent) = bean + pole

The literal compound 'bean' + 'pole' (a pole for supporting bean plants) is directly descriptive, but the same form is also used metaphorically for a person, making the overall usage partly figurative.

Etymology

Beanpole originally named the wooden pole gardeners put in the soil for bean plants to climb ('to climb'), and later people used it for a very tall, thin person because the pole is long and thin. So beanpole can mean the garden stick or someone who is tall and skinny.