elephant
part of speech
noun (an elephant, elephants)
meaning for a pupil
1) An elephant is a very large grey animal with a long trunk, big ears and usually tusks; it lives in Africa and Asia. tree →
2) «The elephant in the room» is a big problem everyone knows about but nobody talks about. tree →
sense in the lessons
In science lessons elephants are mammals and herbivores; the African elephant is the largest land animal. In maths word problems elephants show big weights: an adult elephant can weigh about 6 tonnes. In stories and sayings: «an elephant never forgets». Phrases: the elephant in the room, white elephant (a costly, useless thing).
examples
- The elephant sprayed water with its trunk. tree →
- African elephants have bigger ears than Asian elephants. tree →
- An elephant eats plants all day. tree →
- Baby elephants stay close to their mothers. tree →
- The elephant weighs as much as five cars. tree →
- Nobody mentioned the broken window — it was the elephant in the room. tree →
- There are 3 elephants and each eats 150 kg of food a day. tree →
note
Countable; «an elephant» because it starts with a vowel sound. A young elephant is a calf; a group is a herd. Spelling: -ph- sounds like f. Myth: elephants are afraid of mice — no real evidence.
In the corpora
- The trunk is the elephant's nose and upper lip joined together and grown very long.
- Elephants can swim and use the trunk as a snorkel, keeping only its tip above the water.
- Elephants have a superb sense of smell and more smell genes than dogs, and lift the trunk to catch scents on the wind.
- Elephants greet and comfort each other by touching faces and twisting their trunks together.
- Elephants may jump at small sudden things, but the story that they are specially afraid of mice is a myth.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «elephant» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.