mammal
part of speech
noun (a mammal, mammals)
meaning for a pupil
1) A mammal is an animal that has hair or fur, breathes air and feeds its babies with milk. tree →
2) Most mammals give birth to live babies instead of laying eggs. tree →
sense in the lessons
In science lessons on animal classification, mammals are warm-blooded vertebrates (animals with backbones): dogs, cats, cows, mice, whales, dolphins, bats and humans. Whales and dolphins live in water but are mammals; bats fly but are mammals. A few mammals, the platypus and echidna of Australia, lay eggs. Phrases: sea mammal, marine mammal, the largest mammal.
examples
- Dogs, horses and people are all mammals. tree →
- A whale is a mammal, not a fish. tree →
- Mammals feed their babies with milk. tree →
- The blue whale is the largest mammal ever. tree →
- Bats are the only mammals that can fly. tree →
- The platypus is a mammal that lays eggs. tree →
- Mammals have hair or fur. tree →
- A kangaroo is a mammal that carries its baby in a pouch. tree →
note
Countable: a mammal, mammals. Spell with double m: mammal. Traps: whales, dolphins and seals are mammals, not fish; bats are mammals, not birds; penguins are birds, not mammals.
In the corpora
- Whales are mammals: they breathe air, are warm-blooded, give birth to live young and feed them milk.
- The vaquita, a porpoise in Mexico, is the rarest sea mammal; around ten were reported in recent surveys.
- New Zealand had no ground-hunting mammals before people came, so birds like the kiwi and kakapo did not need to fly.
- Snakes are cold-blooded, so they need far less food than mammals; a big python can go months without a meal.
- Red foxes live on more continents than any other wild meat-eating mammal, and many live in cities such as London.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «mammal» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.