"tall poppy" meaning in English

See tall poppy in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: en-au-tall poppy.ogg [Australia] Forms: tall poppies [plural]
Etymology: A metaphor of something conspicuous that should be lopped. Australian from 1902. Head templates: {{en-noun}} tall poppy (plural tall poppies)
  1. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see tall, poppy. Derived forms: tall poppy syndrome
    Sense id: en-tall_poppy-en-noun-x~fW~PVK
  2. (Australia, New Zealand) A conspicuously successful person, especially one who attracts envious hostility. Tags: Australia, New-Zealand
    Sense id: en-tall_poppy-en-noun-34jWJqd8 Categories (other): Australian English, New Zealand English, English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 17 83

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for tall poppy meaning in English (2.7kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "A metaphor of something conspicuous that should be lopped. Australian from 1902.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "tall poppies",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "tall poppy (plural tall poppies)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "derived": [
        {
          "_dis1": "96 4",
          "word": "tall poppy syndrome"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see tall, poppy."
      ],
      "id": "en-tall_poppy-en-noun-x~fW~PVK",
      "links": [
        [
          "tall",
          "tall#English"
        ],
        [
          "poppy",
          "poppy#English"
        ]
      ]
    },
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Australian English",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "New Zealand English",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "_dis": "17 83",
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w+disamb"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "1999 June 1, Polly Schneider, Australia Unbound, CIO, page 43,\nLike many thriving, young Australian execs, Simpson has to be wary of being construed a “tall poppy,” a cultural label placed on people who flaunt their success, based on the idea that a poppy taller than the others gets chopped down."
        },
        {
          "ref": "2003, Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality, page 240",
          "text": "Others have emphasised how it standardised and enforced social mores, cutting down ‘tall poppies’ and shirking those whose race, political beliefs, aspirations – or sexual proclivities – did not or could not bow to peer pressure.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2010, Mary Nolan, Home Birth: The Politics of Difficult Choices, page 46",
          "text": "This is not so say that any of the health professionals whom the women encountered were bullies or would have been considered by colleagues as bullies; however, they do appear to have been the agents of a bullying maternity service that disliked clients who were tall poppies and was determined to cut them down to size.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A conspicuously successful person, especially one who attracts envious hostility."
      ],
      "id": "en-tall_poppy-en-noun-34jWJqd8",
      "links": [
        [
          "successful",
          "successful"
        ],
        [
          "hostility",
          "hostility"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(Australia, New Zealand) A conspicuously successful person, especially one who attracts envious hostility."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "Australia",
        "New-Zealand"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "audio": "en-au-tall poppy.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/1/15/En-au-tall_poppy.ogg/En-au-tall_poppy.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/En-au-tall_poppy.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "Australia"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (AU)"
    }
  ],
  "word": "tall poppy"
}
{
  "categories": [
    "English countable nouns",
    "English entries with incorrect language header",
    "English lemmas",
    "English multiword terms",
    "English nouns",
    "English terms with audio links"
  ],
  "derived": [
    {
      "word": "tall poppy syndrome"
    }
  ],
  "etymology_text": "A metaphor of something conspicuous that should be lopped. Australian from 1902.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "tall poppies",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "tall poppy (plural tall poppies)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "glosses": [
        "Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see tall, poppy."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "tall",
          "tall#English"
        ],
        [
          "poppy",
          "poppy#English"
        ]
      ]
    },
    {
      "categories": [
        "Australian English",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "New Zealand English",
        "Quotation templates to be cleaned"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "1999 June 1, Polly Schneider, Australia Unbound, CIO, page 43,\nLike many thriving, young Australian execs, Simpson has to be wary of being construed a “tall poppy,” a cultural label placed on people who flaunt their success, based on the idea that a poppy taller than the others gets chopped down."
        },
        {
          "ref": "2003, Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality, page 240",
          "text": "Others have emphasised how it standardised and enforced social mores, cutting down ‘tall poppies’ and shirking those whose race, political beliefs, aspirations – or sexual proclivities – did not or could not bow to peer pressure.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2010, Mary Nolan, Home Birth: The Politics of Difficult Choices, page 46",
          "text": "This is not so say that any of the health professionals whom the women encountered were bullies or would have been considered by colleagues as bullies; however, they do appear to have been the agents of a bullying maternity service that disliked clients who were tall poppies and was determined to cut them down to size.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A conspicuously successful person, especially one who attracts envious hostility."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "successful",
          "successful"
        ],
        [
          "hostility",
          "hostility"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(Australia, New Zealand) A conspicuously successful person, especially one who attracts envious hostility."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "Australia",
        "New-Zealand"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "audio": "en-au-tall poppy.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/1/15/En-au-tall_poppy.ogg/En-au-tall_poppy.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/En-au-tall_poppy.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "Australia"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (AU)"
    }
  ],
  "word": "tall poppy"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.