across
part of speech
preposition, adverb (across)
meaning for a pupil
1) Across means from one side to the other side: you walk across the street. tree →
2) Across means on the other side: the shop across the road. tree →
3) Across tells how wide something is: «2 meters across». tree →
4) In a crossword, «across» clues go from left to right. tree →
sense in the lessons
a distance from side to side, the width of a shape, or rows in a grid; in everyday safety, crossing roads; phrases «across from», «come across» (find by chance), «across the country», «all across»
examples
- The pool is 25 meters across. tree →
- He swims across the lake twice. tree →
- There are 6 tiles across and 4 down. tree →
- The bridge goes across a river 80 feet wide. tree →
- Look both ways before you walk across the road. tree →
- The bakery is across from the school. tree →
- I came across an old photo. tree →
- Write the word for 5 across. tree →
- Birds fly across the sky. tree →
- The circle is 10 cm across. tree →
note
Often gives a width or a length to use; «across and down» in a grid means rows × columns. Trap: going across and back is twice the distance. A circle's «across» is its diameter. Spelled with one c and two s: «across», not «accross».
In the corpora
- Vivid example: in Toronto, red letters slide across the bottom of a cartoon: BREAKING NEWS.
- Donkeys bray to call other donkeys, and the sound can carry about 3 kilometres across their desert homeland.
- Microbes are living things far too small to see; a thousand bacteria in a row would just about stretch across a pinhead.
- Millions of years ago, when the air held more oxygen, some dragonfly relatives had wings about 70 centimetres across.
- The largest fliers ever, pterosaurs like Quetzalcoatlus, had wings about 10 metres across but were light, with hollow bones.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «across» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.