steam
part of speech
noun (steam, uncountable); verb (steam, steams, steamed, steaming)
meaning for a pupil
1) Steam is the hot white mist that rises from boiling water. tree →
2) In science, steam is water as a gas (water vapour), made when water is heated to 100 °C. tree →
3) To steam means to give off steam: the soup is steaming. tree →
4) To steam food means to cook it over boiling water. tree →
5) Steam is the power from steam that drove old trains and engines. tree →
sense in the lessons
In the Tanakh and Jewish tradition: In Sefer Yetzirah's commentary it means water turned to vapor by heat, used to show how fire, water and air work together. Interpretation: The commentator uses steam to show how the elements balance each other. This echoes the book's teaching that air is the balance between fire and water. In the primary lessons: In science steam shows a change of state: liquid water boils and turns into gas; when steam touches a cold window it condenses back into water drops. In safety lessons steam is very hot and can burn: keep your face and hands away from kettles and pans, and open lids away from you. In history, steam engines powered trains and factories. Phrases: let off steam (to release energy or anger), run out of steam (to get tired), full steam ahead, steam train.
examples
- 41) Our author means to say that the water has a great disposition to unite itself with the caloric, thus for instance is the fire latent in steam, but the air equipoises them. (Sefer Yetzirah, Kalisch 1877) tree →
- Steam rose from the kettle. tree →
- Keep your hand away from the steam; it can burn you. tree →
- Water turns into steam when it boils. tree →
- The bathroom mirror was covered in drops after the steam from the shower. tree →
- Mum steamed the broccoli. tree →
- We rode on an old steam train. tree →
- The children let off steam in the playground. tree →
- By the end of the race, I ran out of steam. tree →
note
Uncountable: some steam (not «a steam»). Strictly, pure water vapour is invisible; the white cloud we call steam is tiny drops of water that have already cooled a little. Steam burns can be worse than hot water burns.
In the corpora
- Steam can burn worse than boiling water, because it gives out extra heat as it turns back into water.
- Distillation is boiling a liquid and cooling the steam back to liquid; the drops are pure water, and the salt stays behind.
- Popcorn pops because water inside each kernel turns to steam until the hard shell bursts; dried-out kernels pop badly.
- Water puts out fires mainly by cooling, because it soaks up a lot of heat as it turns to steam.
- Not all bread needs yeast: pitta and tortillas are flat, and pitta puffs up only because water inside turns to steam.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «steam» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.