old man's beard

Questions about old man's beard

What does old man's beard mean?

old man's beard means "dense festoons of greenish-grey hairlike flexuous strands anchored to tree trunks and branches by sparse wiry roots; southeastern United States and West Indies to South America". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

What is another word for old man's beard?

Close synonyms include Spanish moss, black moss, long moss, Tillandsia usneoides, traveler's joy. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is old man's beard a common word?

old man's beard is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.