fleet
part of speech
noun (a fleet, fleets); adjective (fleet — literary)
meaning for a pupil
1) A group of ships, especially navy ships, that sail together. tree →
2) A group of buses, taxis, planes or lorries owned by one company: a fleet of taxis. tree →
3) (adjective, literary) Fast and light on your feet: fleet of foot. tree →
sense in the lessons
In history fleets of ships fought and explored; in everyday life a company has a fleet of vans; in maths problems a fleet has a number of vehicles, each carrying a number of people. Phrases: «a fleet of ships», «a fleet of buses», «fleet-footed», «fishing fleet».
examples
- The fleet sailed out of the harbour. tree →
- The bus company has a fleet of 40 buses. tree →
- A fishing fleet came back with full nets. tree →
- The school hired a fleet of coaches for the trip. tree →
- If each of the 5 buses in the fleet carries 50 people, the fleet carries 250. tree →
- The deer was fleet of foot. tree →
- He assembled his fleet and all the seamen, and set out. tree →
note
A fleet is a group noun: «a fleet of ships». In maths, fleet total = number of vehicles × how many each holds. Not the same as «flight» (a group of birds or a plane journey).
In the corpora
- Kublai Khan's fleets twice tried to invade Japan, in 1274 and 1281, and both attempts failed, partly because of storms.
- From 1405 to 1433 the Chinese admiral Zheng He led huge fleets across the Indian Ocean as far as East Africa.
- In 1788 the First Fleet of eleven ships brought British convicts and soldiers to Sydney Cove to start a prison colony.
- Australia Day on 26 January marks the arrival of the First Fleet, and many Aboriginal people call it Invasion Day.
- Vikings reached North America about a thousand years ago, and Chinese fleets under Zheng He sailed to Africa in the early 1400s.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «fleet» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.