beaver
part of speech
noun (a beaver, beavers); verb (beaver away — informal, to work hard)
meaning for a pupil
1) A beaver is a large rodent with thick brown fur, strong teeth and a wide, flat tail, that lives near rivers and lakes. tree →
2) To beaver away is to work very hard and steadily at something. tree →
sense in the lessons
In science lessons beavers are an example of animals that change their habitat: they cut down trees with their teeth and build dams and homes called lodges, making ponds that help many other animals. They are the national animal of Canada and appear on the Canadian five-cent coin. In everyday life: «eager beaver» means a very keen person; Beavers is also the youngest group in Scouts in the UK.
examples
- Beavers build dams across streams with sticks and mud. tree →
- A beaver slapped its tail on the water as a warning. tree →
- Beavers live in homes called lodges. tree →
- The beaver is a symbol of Canada. tree →
- She's been beavering away at her project all afternoon. tree →
- Beavers' front teeth never stop growing. tree →
note
Countable: a beaver, beavers. Beavers eat bark and plants, not fish. A beaver is a rodent, like mice and squirrels. Their orange front teeth keep growing, and gnawing wood keeps them short.
In the corpora
- Beavers can stay underwater for about 15 minutes, and see-through eyelids work like swimming goggles.
- Some dams have been repaired for hundreds of years by family after family of beavers, each one fixing the dam it inherited.
- Beavers were hunted to extinction in Britain about 400 years ago for their fur and are now being brought back to some rivers.
- In the Ice Age there lived a giant beaver about as big as a black bear.
- Beaver dams slow floods, clean water and make ponds full of life, though some farmers worry about flooded fields.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «beaver» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.