We introduce a novel method for single gold nanorods (GNRs) imaging by polarized light microscopy (PLM) based on their light depolarization light property. The results demonstrate that GNRs can be selectively seen by PLM, while sphere gold nanoparticles only can be observed under darkfield microscopy (DFM). When PLM is applied in single nanoparticle imaging, there are many outstanding features. For example, the average light spot of GNRs occupies 71± 26 pixels, which is only 42 % of that under DFM. The background is significantly reduced and signal-to-noise ratio is greatly improved by at least 3.6 times. Even GNRs in cells can be clearly detected with extreme low background, and the distributions of GNRs in the intracellular space were found to be ununiform. GNRs combined with PLM may find various uses in biomedical and clinical applications as well as in fundamental studies.