pendulum

«pendulum» in Mova's school dictionary: a weight hanging from a fixed point on a string or rod… — 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 pendulum, pendulums)

meaning for a pupil

1) A pendulum is a weight hanging from a fixed point on a string or rod, which swings backwards and forwards. tree →

2) The swinging part of some old clocks, like a grandfather clock, which keeps the clock on time. tree →

3) The idea of something changing from one extreme to the other and back again, like the «pendulum of opinion». tree →

sense in the lessons

In science lessons pupils make a pendulum with string and a weight, time its swings with a stopwatch and find that the length of the string changes how long one swing takes, while the weight hardly does; it is a classic fair test. In stories a ticking pendulum clock adds a spooky or calm feeling. Phrases: swing like a pendulum, the pendulum swings, pendulum clock, the pendulum of a clock.

examples

• The pendulum of the grandfather clock swung slowly. tree →
• We timed ten swings of the pendulum and divided by ten. tree →
• A longer pendulum swings more slowly. tree →
• Changing the weight did not change the pendulum's time much. tree →
• Galileo noticed a lamp swinging like a pendulum in a church. tree →
• The hypnotist swung a watch like a pendulum. tree →
• The pendulum of fashion has swung back to wide trousers. tree →
• A playground swing is a kind of pendulum. tree →
• The pendulum of the great clock went to and fro, and the hands turned, and everything in the room became still older; but they did not observe it. tree →

note

Countable: one pendulum, two pendulums (the Latin plural «pendula» is very rare). Pronounced «PEN-dyoo-lum» or «PEN-juh-lum». In science investigations: to measure the time of one swing more accurately, time ten swings and divide by 10. Trap: many children guess a heavier weight swings faster, but the length of the string matters, not the weight.

In the corpora

• A swing is a pendulum: a weight hanging from a point, going back and forth with its own steady rhythm.
• A short pendulum swings quickly and a long one slowly; one four times as long takes twice as long to swing.
• Galileo noticed that a pendulum takes the same time to swing whether the swing is big or small.
• In 1656 Christiaan Huygens built a pendulum clock, far more accurate than any clock before.
• A pendulum about 1 metre long takes about 1 second to swing one way.

Trees and pragmatics

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