colony
part of speech
noun (a colony, colonies)
meaning for a pupil
1) A group of animals or plants of one kind that live together: a colony of ants, a bat colony. tree →
2) A country or area ruled by another, usually faraway, country: the thirteen American colonies. tree →
3) A group of people living together in a new place, far from their home country. tree →
4) (science) A group of bacteria or mould growing together on a dish. tree →
sense in the lessons
In science lessons ants, bees, penguins and seals live in colonies; bacteria grow in colonies on agar plates. In history lessons Britain, France and Spain had colonies in America, Africa, Asia and Australia, and many later became independent. Phrases: an ant colony, a seal colony, a former colony, establish a colony.
examples
- A colony of ants can have thousands of workers. tree →
- We saw a seal colony on the rocks. tree →
- The thirteen colonies became the United States. tree →
- Australia was once a British colony. tree →
- A bacteria colony grew on the dish in the lab. tree →
- Penguins nest in huge colonies. tree →
- The Cat cunningly resolved to destroy this chance-made colony. tree →
note
Plural colonies (y to ies). Related: colonise, colonist, colonial. In history, colonies often took land from the people already living there; this caused great harm.
In the corpora
- The penguins in Madagascar are four, but real penguins live in big colonies, sometimes of thousands.
- Each chick has its own voice, and its parents recognise it among thousands of others in a noisy colony.
- By midsummer the colony can grow from about 10,000 bees to 50,000 or more.
- Sousliks are a main food for steppe eagles, imperial eagles and steppe polecats, so when souslik colonies disappear these hunters disappear too.
- In Europa Universalis 5 sugar is a valuable trade good from Caribbean colonies and grain is the plain good of many locations.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «colony» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.