centipede
part of speech
noun (a centipede, centipedes)
meaning for a pupil
A centipede is a small long thin creature with a flat body divided into many parts, each with one pair of legs. It is fast, lives in dark damp places and hunts insects. tree →
sense in the lessons
In science lessons, centipedes are arthropods but not insects (insects have 6 legs). They live under logs and stones in minibeast hunts. They have poison claws to catch prey, and big tropical ones can give a painful bite. Compared with millipedes: centipedes have one pair of legs per body part, are fast hunters; millipedes have two pairs per part, are slow and eat dead plants.
examples
- A centipede ran out from under the log. tree →
- Centipedes hunt insects and spiders. tree →
- A centipede has one pair of legs on each body part. tree →
- «Centi» means a hundred, but most centipedes don't have exactly 100 legs. tree →
- We found a centipede during our minibeast hunt. tree →
- Big centipedes can bite, so don't pick them up. tree →
- Centipedes like dark, damp places. tree →
- Is it a centipede or a millipede? Count the legs on each section. tree →
- The centipede was invulnerable to weapons! tree →
note
Countable. «Centi-» = hundred (as in centimetre, century), «-pede» = foot. Maths trap: centipedes always have an odd number of pairs of legs (15, 21, 23…), so never exactly 100 legs (50 pairs). Myth: millipedes do not have 1,000 legs (most have far fewer).
In the corpora
- Centipedes always have an odd number of pairs of legs, so no centipede has exactly 100 legs.
- Centipedes are fast hunters with one pair of legs on each body segment and venom claws to catch insects.
- Despite their name, no centipede has exactly one hundred legs, and most millipedes have far fewer than a thousand.
- Millipedes have two pairs of legs on most body sections and centipedes have one pair, which is how you tell them apart.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «centipede» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.