convention
part of speech
noun (a convention, conventions; convention, uncountable)
meaning for a pupil
1) The usual or accepted way of doing something; a custom or rule people follow. tree →
2) A large meeting of people with the same interest or job (a comic convention). tree →
3) An official agreement between countries (the Geneva Convention). tree →
4) (maths, writing) A standard rule everyone agrees to use, such as writing numbers left to right. tree →
sense in the lessons
In maths: conventions such as the order of operations (BODMAS/BIDMAS/PEMDAS) and labelling axes x and y. In English: writing conventions like capital letters and full stops. In everyday life: comic conventions, conventions of politeness. Phrases: by convention, break with convention.
examples
- By convention, we write the x-axis across the page. tree →
- Spelling and punctuation are writing conventions. tree →
- We dressed up for the comic convention. tree →
- Shaking hands is a convention in many countries. tree →
- The Geneva Convention protects prisoners of war. tree →
- The writer broke with convention and used no capital letters. tree →
- The possibility of the introduction of an archaic formula which had become a convention of folk-telling cannot be left out of account. tree →
note
Adjective: conventional (usual, ordinary). In maths, conventions are agreed rules, not proven facts; following them means everyone gets the same answer.
In the corpora
- Henri Dunant helped start the Red Cross in 1863, and in 1864 countries signed the first Geneva Convention to protect wounded soldiers.
- In the 1800s children worked in mines and mills; in 1989 the UN agreed the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
- The 1951 Refugee Convention, an international agreement, says countries must not send refugees back to danger.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «convention» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.