neat
part of speech
adjective (neat, neater, neatest)
meaning for a pupil
1) Tidy and in good order: «a neat bedroom». tree →
2) Done carefully and clearly: «neat handwriting». tree →
3) (informal, especially US) Very good, cool: «That's a neat trick!» tree →
4) Clever and simple: «a neat solution». tree →
5) (of a drink) With no water or ice added. tree →
sense in the lessons
In school: «neat handwriting», «keep your work neat», «a neat drawing»; neat work is easier to read and check, especially in maths with numbers lined up in columns. In everyday life: «keep your room neat». Phrases: «neat and tidy», «neat handwriting», «That's neat!».
examples
- Keep your desk neat and tidy. tree →
- She has very neat handwriting. tree →
- Line up your numbers neatly in columns. tree →
- Wow, that's a neat trick! tree →
- He folded his clothes in a neat pile. tree →
- Using a pattern was a neat way to solve the puzzle. tree →
- My room is neater than my brother's. tree →
- Little as Geppetto’s house was, it was neat and comfortable. tree →
note
Comparative: neater, neatest. Adverb: neatly; noun: neatness. Neat in work does not mean fast; it means careful.
In the corpora
- Leafcutter bees wrap their rooms in neat circles cut from rose leaves.
- At Mezhyrich in Ukraine, about 15,000 years ago, people built huts from mammoth bones, with jaws stacked in a neat zigzag.
- Scientists even borrowed Kipling's title: they call a neat explanation that nobody has tested «a just-so story».
- Some girls sneer «Princess Lily» because her hair is neat and her books are tidy.
- Evidence that looks too neat, all done at once, can show something was faked at the last minute.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «neat» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.