croquet
part of speech
noun (croquet, uncountable); verb (croquet, croquets, croqueted, croqueting — rare)
meaning for a pupil
1) A lawn game in which players hit wooden balls with long-handled wooden mallets through small metal hoops stuck in the grass. tree →
2) (verb, rare) To knock another player's ball away by hitting your own ball against it. tree →
sense in the lessons
Croquet is played in gardens and clubs, especially in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, often in summer. In Alice in Wonderland the Queen's croquet game is mad: the balls are live hedgehogs, the mallets are live flamingos and the hoops are soldiers bent over, and the Queen shouts «Off with his head!». Phrases: «a game of croquet», «croquet lawn», «croquet mallet».
examples
- We played croquet on Grandpa's lawn after lunch. tree →
- Alice's flamingo kept twisting round to look at her instead of hitting the hedgehog. tree →
- Hit the ball through the hoop with the mallet. tree →
- The croquet club meets every Saturday in summer. tree →
- The Queen played croquet with live hedgehogs. tree →
- It is hard to play croquet when the lawn is bumpy. tree →
- The soldiers had to bend over to be the croquet hoops. tree →
note
Sounds like «CROH-kay»; the t is silent. It is uncountable: «a game of croquet», not «a croquet». Do not mix up with croquette (a fried roll of food) or cricket.
In the corpora
- An invitation from the Queen to play croquet."
- The Queen asks Alice if she can play croquet: «Yes!»
- Croquet with live animals is hopeless.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «croquet» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.