centimetre
part of speech
noun (centimetre, centimetres; cm — British spelling)
meaning for a pupil
Centimetre is the British, Irish, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian way to spell centimeter, a small unit of length about the width of a fingernail. 100 centimetres make 1 metre. A metre is 100 centimetres. A centimetre is 10 millimetres. tree →
sense in the lessons
a unit of length for lines, sides of shapes and small objects; school rulers show centimetres; phrases «square centimetres» (cm²), «cubic centimetres» (cm³)
examples
- The worm is 6 centimetres long. tree →
- A rectangle is 8 centimetres by 3 centimetres. tree →
- 1 metre is 100 centimetres. tree →
- The tower is 25 centimetres tall. tree →
- Draw a line 12 centimetres long. tree →
- My hand is about 15 centimetres long. tree →
- The seedling grew 2 centimetres in a week. tree →
- Rain: 3 centimetres fell overnight. tree →
- The shoebox is 30 centimetres long. tree →
- Each square on the grid is one square centimetre. tree →
note
A unit, not a thing counted. Trap: square centimetres measure area, centimetres measure length. Same meaning as «centimeter»; only the spelling differs (-re in Britain, -er in the USA). Short form «cm».
In the corpora
- The Mona Lisa is about 77 centimetres tall and 53 centimetres wide; Guernica is almost 8 metres wide.
- Aquarium tunnels are made of acrylic many centimetres thick, strong enough to hold back millions of litres of water.
- Millions of years ago, when the air held more oxygen, some dragonfly relatives had wings about 70 centimetres across.
- A giraffe's dark tongue is about 45 to 50 centimetres long and pulls leaves past the thorns of acacia trees.
- An ostrich's eye is about 5 centimetres across, the biggest of any land animal and bigger than its own brain.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «centimetre» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.