breathe
part of speech
verb (breathe, breathes, breathed, breathing)
meaning for a pupil
1) To breathe is to take air into your body and let it out again. tree →
2) To breathe in is to take air in; to breathe out is to let it out. tree →
3) To breathe can mean to say very softly: «She breathed a word». tree →
4) To breathe freely is to feel safe and relaxed, without fear of being caught. tree →
sense in the lessons
an action with a rate: breaths per minute; in science, lungs take in oxygen and give out carbon dioxide; fish breathe with gills; phrases «breathe in», «breathe out», «take a deep breath», «out of breath»
examples
- A person breathes about 16 times a minute. tree →
- How many breaths in 5 minutes? tree →
- A whale can hold its breath for 20 minutes. tree →
- She breathes in for 4 seconds. tree →
- Breathe in slowly through your nose. tree →
- Fish breathe through their gills. tree →
- Take a deep breath when you feel upset. tree →
- After the race I could hardly breathe. tree →
- Plants help us breathe by making oxygen. tree →
- We breathe faster when we run. tree →
- Robbers and smugglers could breathe freely here. tree →
note
A rate per minute: total = rate × minutes. Trap: watch the time units. «Breathe» (verb, long ee sound) and «breath» (noun, short e sound) are different words.
In the corpora
- Slow breathing, such as breathing in while counting to four and out while counting to six, helps calm a racing heart.
- Circular breathing means breathing in through the nose while pushing out air stored in the cheeks, so the sound never stops.
- Whales are mammals: they breathe air, are warm-blooded, give birth to live young and feed them milk.
- Whales breathe through a blowhole on top of the head, and the spout is warm wet breath forming a cloud of mist.
- Dolphins sleep with half of their brain at a time, switching sides, so they can keep coming up to breathe.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «breathe» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.