paperwork
part of speech
noun, uncountable (paperwork)
meaning for a pupil
1) Forms, letters, reports and other papers that must be filled in or kept, especially for school, work or the government. tree →
2) The boring work of writing, filling in and sorting such papers, often seen as getting in the way of real work. tree →
3) (informal) Any official record, even on a computer, such as online forms. tree →
sense in the lessons
In everyday life adults talk about paperwork for a new house, a passport, a school trip or a doctor's visit; a permission slip is paperwork too. In stories a tired teacher or officer sits behind «piles of paperwork». In school maths it can be a word problem about sheets or forms to be counted or shared. Phrases: «do the paperwork», «fill in the paperwork», «a pile of paperwork», «drowning in paperwork», «sort out the paperwork».
examples
- Dad stayed up late doing the paperwork for our new car. tree →
- You must hand in the paperwork before the school trip. tree →
- The vet asked us to fill in some paperwork about our dog. tree →
- Mrs Lee had a mountain of paperwork on her desk. tree →
- The police officer said the paperwork would take an hour. tree →
- Each form in the paperwork had 4 pages, and there were 12 forms. tree →
- Moving house means lots of paperwork. tree →
- "Ugh, more paperwork," groaned the coach. tree →
note
Uncountable: say «a lot of paperwork», «some paperwork», «a piece of paperwork», never «a paperwork» or «paperworks». It is one word. Often sounds slightly negative — dull but necessary.
In the corpora
- Moving means packing everything, doing paperwork and saying goodbye all at once, so it is very stressful.
- Banks and companies use dry, technical words so that debt and job losses sound like ordinary paperwork.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «paperwork» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.