ant

«ant» in Mova's school dictionary: A very small insect with six legs that lives in large… — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 5 sentences of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

noun (an ant, ants)

meaning for a pupil

1) A very small insect with six legs that lives in large, organised groups called colonies, often in nests under the ground. tree →

2) "Ants in your pants" is a jokey way of saying someone cannot sit still. tree →

sense in the lessons

In science, ants are insects: three body parts (head, thorax, abdomen), six legs and two antennae. They live in colonies with a queen who lays eggs and worker ants who find food, carry loads many times their own weight and follow scent trails. Some ants bite or sting (fire ants), so look but do not poke ant nests. In stories, the ant is hard-working (the fable "The Ant and the Grasshopper"). Phrases: "ant hill", "ant colony", "worker ant", "queen ant", "ants in your pants".

examples

• An ant has six legs. tree →
• A long line of ants carried crumbs back to their nest. tree →
• The queen ant lays all the eggs. tree →
• Ants can carry things much heavier than themselves. tree →
• Don't poke the ant hill or they might bite. tree →
• In the story, the ant saved food for the winter. tree →
• We watched ants through a magnifying glass. tree →
• Stop wriggling — you've got ants in your pants! tree →
• He found an ant in it. tree →

note

Use "an": an ant. Homophone: "ant" and "aunt" sound the same in many American accents (in British English "aunt" sounds like "aren't"). Ants are insects, but spiders are not (spiders have eight legs). In maths problems, count legs: 5 ants have 5 × 6 = 30 legs.

In the corpora

• Leafcutter ants do not eat the leaves they carry: they chew them to grow a fungus garden underground and eat the fungus.
• An echidna has no teeth and catches ants and termites with a long sticky tongue after breaking into their nests with strong claws.
• Anteaters get a specially made mushy mix that copies an ant diet, because a zoo cannot collect enough wild ants.
• Leafcutter ants cut and carry leaves but do not eat them; they grow a fungus on chewed leaf paste and eat the fungus.
• A big leafcutter nest can hold millions of ants, and they have farmed fungus for millions of years, long before people farmed.

Trees and pragmatics

Every meaning and example of «ant» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.