mass
part of speech
noun (mass, a mass, masses); adjective (mass — many people); verb (mass, masses, massed, massing)
meaning for a pupil
1) Mass is the amount of matter in an object, measured in grams and kilograms. tree →
2) A mass is a large amount or lump of something without a clear shape. tree →
3) A mass of people or things is a large crowd or number. tree →
4) Masses of something (informal) means lots of it. tree →
5) Mass is the main service in the Catholic church. tree →
6) Mass (adjective) means involving very many people, like mass transport. tree →
sense in the lessons
Interpretation: The word describes the "formless mass" that Greek and Roman writers imagined before the world. Jewish tradition compares it to the "tohu vavohu," the emptiness and void of Genesis 1:2. In Job it means a lump, as when dust runs together into a hard mass of clods. In the primary lessons: In science and maths, mass is measured with scales or a balance: 1 kilogram = 1000 grams. Mass stays the same everywhere, but weight (the pull of gravity) changes: on the Moon you weigh less but your mass is the same. In geography, a land mass is a large area of land. Phrases: mass of, masses of, land mass, the masses (ordinary people), go to Mass, mass production.
examples
- Later cosmogonists, such as Ovid, represent it as the confused, shapless mass, out of which the universe was formed into a cosmos, or harmonious order. (Mordell, The Origin of Letters and Numerals according to Sefer Yetzirah (1914)) tree →
- When the dust runneth into a mass, and the clods cleave fast together? (Writings JOB.38.38, JPS 1917) tree →
- The mass of the apple is 150 grams. tree →
- Use the balance to find the mass of the stone. tree →
- A mass of clouds covered the sky. tree →
- There were masses of people at the concert. tree →
- Australia is a huge land mass. tree →
- Grandma goes to Mass on Sunday. tree →
- Factories make toys by mass production. tree →
- They could not pull their feet out of the sticky mass. tree →
note
In maths, mass units: grams (g), kilograms (kg), tonnes (t); 1 kg = 1000 g; 1 tonne = 1000 kg. Everyday people say "weight" when they mean mass; in science they differ (weight is a force, in newtons). Capital M for the church service.
In the corpora
- When the dust runneth into a mass, and the clods cleave fast together?
- A glacier is a huge mass of ice that slowly flows downhill under its own weight.
- The biggest mass extinction, about 252 million years ago, wiped out about 90% of sea species.
- Everything that has mass pulls on everything else, and this pull is called gravity.
- Many studies report that Australia has had far fewer mass shootings since 1996, though people argue about whether other countries could copy it.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «mass» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.