meal

«meal» in Mova's school dictionary: the food you eat at one time, such as breakfast, lunch or… — 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 meal, meals); noun (meal, uncountable — roughly ground grain, as in oatmeal)

meaning for a pupil

1) A meal is the food you eat at one time, such as breakfast, lunch or dinner. tree →

2) A meal is also the time when you eat this food. tree →

3) Meal (uncountable) is grain ground into a rough powder, like oatmeal or cornmeal. tree →

sense in the lessons

In health lessons eating regular, balanced meals (with vegetables, fruit, grains and protein) gives energy all day. In everyday life families share meals; names for meals differ: lunch or dinner at midday, dinner, tea or supper in the evening. In maths problems meals are counted: three meals a day for a week is 21 meals. Phrases: have a meal, a big meal, a hot meal, meal time, ready meal, make a meal of something (make it take too long).

examples

• Breakfast is the first meal of the day. tree →
• We had a lovely meal at Grandma's house. tree →
• Wash your hands before every meal. tree →
• Try to eat vegetables with every meal. tree →
• Three meals a day for a week makes twenty-one meals. tree →
• Dinner is my favourite meal. tree →
• We cooked a meal for the family together. tree →
• Don't eat lots of snacks just before a meal. tree →
• Iktomi had no regular meal times. tree →

note

Countable: a meal, meals. A snack is a small amount of food between meals, not a meal. Cornmeal and oatmeal are foods made from ground grain. «Make a meal of something» means take too long or make too much fuss.

In the corpora

• Much housework is invisible, like booking appointments and planning meals, so each grown-up may not see what the other does.
• Families make phone rules so meals are for talking, and adults find them hard to keep because phones are built to grab attention.
• The whole journey of a meal through the gut usually takes about one to three days.
• Snakes are cold-blooded, so they need far less food than mammals; a big python can go months without a meal.
• Zoo kitchens prepare hundreds of meals a day, and nutritionists plan the right mix of food for each kind of animal.

Trees and pragmatics

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