poster girl
4
4.6
- noun
- /ˈpoʊstər ɡɜrl/
:
mujer símbolo
- Kansas is the fiercest state battleground for abortion wars, making Kathleen Sebelius the national pro-choice poster girl.
- become a poster girl
- poster girl for women
- new poster girl
And she's, like my poster girl for knowing that you need to celebrate everybody's wins.
- And she's, like my poster girl for knowing that you need to celebrate everybody's wins.
Examples
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She may be the poster girl for the pop country movement and has the most hype around her personal and professional life, but Taylor Swift just couldn't pull out a win at this year's Country Music Awards.
Blog text (16) -
Dottie can catch, hit, and run (and look good doing it), so she was a natural poster girl for the league.
Blog text (3) -
How does it feel to be the poster girl for the sexual revolution?
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You're a real poster girl for birth control, you know that?
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I once saw Kate Moss complain about being used as the poster girl for eating disorders.
Blog text (24) -
She's a hell of a catcher, a solid hitter, and a real 'dolly'—just the sort of poster girl Harvey is looking to promote.
Blog text (24) -
Stacy had the healthy, ash-blond good looks of a poster girl for women's Nordic sports: tall, broad-shouldered, flat-muscled, with a square jaw and high cheekbones.
Fiction book (2000) -
Laura Scanlan considers herself the poster girl for early detection of breast cancer through mammography.
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Gwyneth Paltrow has also become sort of the poster girl for literary adaptation, starring in "Emma" and "Great Expectations."
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First, I'm a pretty good poster girl for the unemployed.
Synonyms
24
4.8
A person who is a clear example of a cause or movement
21
5.5
A man people see as a perfect example of something
How Representative
Surface Forms
Morphology
poster + girl
A learner who knows 'poster' (a printed advertisement/image) and 'girl' would plausibly infer someone depicted on a poster — i.e., a female representative or face of something — but the sense 'prominent or typical example' is a metaphorical extension rather than strictly compositional. This requires some cultural/pragmatic knowledge (how posters represent causes/people), so the meaning is partially but not fully predictable for a B1 learner.
Etymology
Poster girl may come from advertising posters where a girl on a poster stood for a product or an idea. So, because she represented that idea, the phrase now means 'a typical example' or 'a public symbol' for a cause.