ceiling

«ceiling» in Mova's school dictionary: The inside surface at the top of a room, above your head — 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 (a ceiling, ceilings)

meaning for a pupil

1) The inside surface at the top of a room, above your head. tree →

2) An upper limit that something cannot go above, like a price ceiling. tree →

3) The height of the lowest clouds, important for planes. tree →

sense in the lessons

In everyday life, lights, fans and smoke alarms are fixed on ceilings; smoke rises, so smoke alarms go on the ceiling, and you should crawl low under smoke in a fire. In maths, room problems use the ceiling: the area of the ceiling is the same as the floor in a box-shaped room; height from floor to ceiling. In science, warm air rises towards the ceiling. Phrases: "on the ceiling", "hit the ceiling" (get very angry), "glass ceiling" (an unfair limit on getting ahead), "ceiling fan", "floor to ceiling".

examples

• A spider was crawling on the ceiling. tree →
• The smoke alarm is on the ceiling. tree →
• The ceiling is 2.5 metres high. tree →
• We painted the ceiling white. tree →
• Dad hit the ceiling when he saw the mess. tree →
• The ceiling fan kept the room cool. tree →
• Bookshelves went from floor to ceiling. tree →
• In a fire, smoke collects at the ceiling first, so stay low. tree →
• Shining glow-worms covered the ceiling, and sky-blue bats flapped their transparent wings. tree →

note

Spelling trap: "ei" after c — c-e-i-l-i-n-g ("i before e, except after c"). Do not confuse with "sealing" (closing tightly), which sounds the same. In maths, in a rectangular room, ceiling area = length × width, the same as the floor.

In the corpora

• Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling standing on a scaffold and bending his head back, not lying down.
• «i before e except after c» works mainly for the /ee/ sound: believe, field, receive, ceiling.
• It is hot and lighter than the cool air, so it rises and gathers at the ceiling first.
• Hot smoke is less dense than cool air, so it rises and fills a room from the ceiling down.
• Water from an overflowing bath can leak through the floor into the ceiling below and onto electrical wiring.

Trees and pragmatics

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