tall
/tɔːl
/- He stood up to offer a handshake, revealing that he was a tall man, of average but sufficient build.
- Pour the Pimm's into a tall glass and add the lemon, cucumber and strawberries.
- Water will trickle audibly here and there, and there'll be the gentle swish of bamboo and tall grasses.
Synonyms
- He says you must stand back and look at the tree from a distance to get an idea how tall it is.
- A tribe of pygmies from the Grasslands of Africa, the Fukawi grow to a height of 4 feet tall.
- The steel glasses were 3 feet tall and you wonder how all of it fit into one person.
Synonyms
Phrases
a tall order
a tall story (or tale)
walk (or stand) tall
Derivatives
tallish
- The ornamental verbena, sometimes also known as vervain, refers to (among others) Verbena bonariensis, the purple topped tallish plant that has colonised roadways and pasture throughout Australia.
- The practice in question is the growing of goldenrod, a tallish native weed with feathery yellow plumes.
- He was a tallish man with rustic brown hair and twinkling blue eyes.
tallness
/ noun ...- The medication cannot be accepted as safe for children until it is known that added tallness will not be associated with some defect of development somewhere in the body.
- The voice, for example, stays high-pitched, the body develops a rounded contour, and the loss of hormones produces an unusual tallness and also prevents the skin from tanning.
- He tended to scare off little kids with his tallness, burliness and rareness to smile, but inside he was a nice man.
Origin
Late Middle English: probably from Old English getæl 'swift, prompt'. Early senses also included 'fine, handsome' and 'bold, strong, good at fighting'.
Some words have undergone remarkable changes in meaning over the centuries. One such is tall. In medieval times it was used in such senses as ‘quick’, ‘handsome’, and ‘good at fighting’, as in Sir Walter Scott's reference to ‘the ‘ “tall men”, or champions, of Wales’. Only in the 16th century did the sense ‘of more than average height’ appear. A privileged or distinguished person may be referred to as a tall poppy. This goes back to a story about the Roman tyrant Tarquin, who is said to have struck off the heads of a row of poppies in a gruesomely graphic demonstration of the way in which the important men of a captured city should be treated. Since the early 1980s, originally in Australia, the expression tall poppy syndrome has been used for the tendency to criticize people who have become rich, famous, or socially prominent.