decoy

«decoy» in Mova's school dictionary: a person or thing used to trick someone and lead them… — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 1 sentence of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

noun (a decoy, decoys); verb (decoy, decoys, decoyed, decoying)

meaning for a pupil

1) A decoy is a person or thing used to trick someone and lead them away or into a trap. tree →

2) A decoy is a model of a bird, such as a wooden duck, used by hunters to attract real birds. tree →

3) To decoy someone is to trick them in this way. tree →

sense in the lessons

In stories, games and war history, decoys distract enemies: fake tanks, dummy soldiers. In nature, some animals act as decoys (a bird pretends to have a broken wing to lead a fox away from its nest). In sport, a decoy runner draws defenders away.

examples

• The duck decoy floated on the pond. tree →
• The army used inflatable tanks as decoys. tree →
• One friend acted as a decoy while the others hid the present. tree →
• The mother bird pretended to be hurt as a decoy. tree →
• The striker made a decoy run to draw the defender. tree →
• The spy was decoyed into a trap. tree →
• The bird-trap was quite empty, as he had caught nothing, and he had to kill a pied Partridge, which he had tamed for a decoy. tree →

note

Countable: decoys. Regular verb: decoyed. Pronounced «DEE-koy» (noun), «dih-KOY» (verb, sometimes).

In the corpora

• Octopuses and squid squirt dark ink and jet away, and some squid make an ink blob shaped like themselves as a decoy.

Trees and pragmatics

Every meaning and example of «decoy» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.