metre

«metre» in Mova's school dictionary: a measure of length; a big step is about one metre — 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 (metre, metres; also meter, meters in American spelling)

meaning for a pupil

1) A metre is a measure of length; a big step is about one metre. tree →

2) A meter is also a machine that measures something, like a water meter or a parking meter. tree →

3) Metre can mean the beat in a poem or a song. tree →

sense in the lessons

the unit the lengths are told in: a metre is 100 centimetres, a kilometre is 1000 metres; in sport races are run in metres; phrases: «metres long», «metres wide», «metres high», «square metre», «per metre»

examples

• A rope is 21 metres long. tree →
• Sam runs 100 metres. tree →
• The garden is 8 metres long and 5 metres wide. tree →
• A metre is 100 centimetres. tree →
• A kilometre is 1000 metres. tree →
• The door is about 2 metres high. tree →
• The giraffe is over 5 metres tall. tree →
• Measure the room with a metre stick. tree →

note

«A metre is 100 centimetres.» «A kilometre is 1000 metres.» Short form: m (21 m). Lengths in the same unit are added and taken away like counts. Trap: check that both lengths use metres before adding.

In the corpora

• The Mona Lisa is about 77 centimetres tall and 53 centimetres wide; Guernica is almost 8 metres wide.
• Plants grow mainly at the tips of their shoots and roots, and some bamboos can grow nearly a metre in a day.
• The largest fliers ever, pterosaurs like Quetzalcoatlus, had wings about 10 metres across but were light, with hollow bones.
• Every rainy season the Amazon rises by up to ten metres or more and floods huge areas of forest for months.
• The black caiman is the biggest predator of the Amazon, over four metres long, and hunts fish and capybaras at night.

Trees and pragmatics

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