lens

«lens» in Mova's school dictionary: a curved piece of glass or plastic that bends light to… — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 5 sentences of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

noun (a lens, lenses)

meaning for a pupil

1) A lens is a curved piece of glass or plastic that bends light to make things look bigger, smaller or clearer, used in glasses, cameras, microscopes and telescopes. tree →

2) The lens of the eye is the clear part behind the pupil that focuses light. tree →

3) A contact lens is a thin lens you wear on your eye. tree →

sense in the lessons

In science lessons on light, lenses bend (refract) light; a magnifying glass uses a convex lens to make things look bigger. Your eye's lens focuses images on the back of the eye. In everyday life people wear glasses or contact lenses to see clearly, and cameras need a clean lens. Phrases: «camera lens», «contact lenses», «magnifying lens», «convex lens», «concave lens», «through the lens of» (from the point of view of).

examples

• A magnifying glass has a convex lens. tree →
• Clean the camera lens before you take a photo. tree →
• My aunt wears contact lenses. tree →
• The lens in your eye focuses light. tree →
• A microscope uses lenses to make tiny things look big. tree →
• The telescope's lens collected light from the stars. tree →
• Never look at the Sun through a lens. tree →
• My glasses have thick lenses. tree →

note

Singular is «lens» (not «len»); plural «lenses». Convex lenses bulge out and can make things bigger; concave lenses curve in. Safety: a lens can focus sunlight and start a fire or burn your eyes — never look at the Sun through one.

In the corpora

• Digital zoom just enlarges pixels and loses detail; getting closer or using a real zoom lens gives sharper pictures.
• Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first saw tiny living things in water, which he called «animalcules», with homemade lenses in the 1670s.
• Clean glasses with water and a soft cloth, not your T-shirt, because rough cloth scratches the lenses.
• Antonie van Leeuwenhoek made tiny powerful lenses and was the first to see living microbes in a drop of water, in the 1670s.
• A doctor looks inside the ear with an otoscope, a small torch with a magnifying lens.

Trees and pragmatics

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