leg
part of speech
noun (leg, legs)
meaning for a pupil
1) A leg is a part of the body that people and animals stand and walk on. tree →
2) Tables, chairs and stools also have legs that hold them up. tree →
3) A leg of a trip or a race is one part of it. tree →
4) The leg of trousers is the part that covers your leg. tree →
sense in the lessons
In school maths: a counted part: each animal or object has a fixed number of legs (a hen has 2 legs, a dog has 4 legs, an insect has 6 legs, a spider has 8 legs, a stool has 3 legs); legs puzzles; one part of a trip or relay race. In science: insects have 6 legs, spiders 8; leg bones and muscles. Phrases: «break a leg» (good luck to an actor), «pull someone's leg» (joke with them), «on its last legs» (almost broken).
examples
- A dog has 4 legs. How many legs do 5 dogs have? tree →
- There are chickens and cows with 30 legs in all. tree →
- Each stool has 3 legs. tree →
- The first leg of the trip is 20 km. tree →
- She hurt her leg playing netball. tree →
- An insect has 6 legs and a spider has 8 legs. tree →
- He ran the last leg of the relay. tree →
- Are you pulling my leg? tree →
- Take care, and remember your legs." tree →
note
Countable: «a leg», «legs». «Break a leg!» is a kind wish, not a bad one. Maths: hides a multiplication: number of animals × legs each. Trap: the problem often does not say how many legs each animal has; you must know it (bird 2, insect 6, spider 8).
In the corpora
- You can be kind and honest at once: "I love the colours, the horse's legs could be longer."
- "Break a leg" is a theatre way of saying good luck.
- Centipedes always have an odd number of pairs of legs, so no centipede has exactly 100 legs.
- A dragonfly has 6 legs and 4 wings, like many insects.
- Snakes push their bodies against bumps on the ground to move, and pythons still have tiny leg bones left from ancestors with legs.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «leg» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.