cup
part of speech
noun (cup, cups); verb (cup — to hold in curved hands)
meaning for a pupil
1) A cup is a small container with a handle that you drink from. tree →
2) A cup is the amount a cup holds, also a unit in recipes: a cup of flour. tree →
3) A cup is a prize in a sport, often shaped like a big cup: the World Cup. tree →
sense in the lessons
a thing on the table (not a fruit); a container («each cup holds 3 sweets» = size of one group); in cooking «2 cups of milk» is a measure; in sport the cup final; in everyday life «a cup of tea», «not my cup of tea» (not what I like)
examples
- I place one cup on the table. tree →
- Student: one cup and one pear tree →
- Each cup holds 3 sweets. How many sweets are in 5 cups? tree →
- Would you like a cup of hot chocolate? tree →
- Add two cups of flour to the bowl. tree →
- Our team won the cup! tree →
- Be careful: the cup is hot. tree →
- She cupped the little bird in her hands. tree →
- Then he filled the cup again. tree →
note
Not a fruit, so it does not count in «how many fruits». Trap: «cups of flour» counts the flour, and the cups are its measure. Hot cups can burn; hold them by the handle.
In the corpora
- Swallows and house martins build cup nests from mud mixed with spit, and a house martin nest takes about 1,000 mud pellets.
- The tailorbird pokes holes in leaves and pulls plant fibres or spider silk through them to sew a leaf cup round its nest.
- A gasp, a scream or a dropped cup are clues that something surprising has happened.
- "In his cups" is an old phrase meaning drunk.
- Chemicals should always stay in their own labelled bottles, never in drink bottles or cups.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «cup» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.