pellet
part of speech
noun (a pellet, pellets)
meaning for a pupil
1) A small hard ball or piece of something, such as food for animals, ice or metal. tree →
2) An owl pellet is a small lump of fur and bones that an owl brings up after eating. tree →
sense in the lessons
In science, children pull apart owl pellets to find tiny bones and learn what owls eat. In everyday life, pets such as rabbits and fish eat food pellets. Hailstones are pellets of ice. Phrases: owl pellet, food pellets, ice pellets, wood pellets.
examples
- We found mouse bones in the owl pellet. tree →
- Give the rabbit a handful of pellets. tree →
- Ice pellets bounced on the car roof. tree →
- The fish ate the tiny pellets. tree →
- Owls swallow small animals whole. tree →
- Some stoves burn wood pellets. tree →
note
Countable. Double l: p-e-l-l-e-t. Owl pellets are not droppings; they come out of the owl's mouth. Wash hands after handling pellets in science lessons.
In the corpora
- Slug pellets can poison hedgehogs that eat poisoned slugs, and hedgehogs are getting rarer in Britain.
- Swallows and house martins build cup nests from mud mixed with spit, and a house martin nest takes about 1,000 mud pellets.
- Think of an owl pellet on a classroom table: a ball of fur and tiny bones the owl coughed up, not poo.
- Slug pellets can harm hedgehogs and birds, and the most harmful kind was banned in Britain.
- Slug pellets and rat poison can kill pets and wildlife, not only slugs and rats.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «pellet» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.