piece

«piece» in Mova's school dictionary: a part of something that has been cut, broken or divided… — 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 (piece, pieces); verb (piece together)

meaning for a pupil

1) A piece is a part of something that has been cut, broken or divided, like a piece of cake. tree →

2) A piece is one single item of something, like a piece of paper or a piece of advice. tree →

3) A piece is one of the parts of a game or a puzzle, like a chess piece. tree →

4) A piece is a work of music, art or writing. tree →

sense in the lessons

a unit for counting parts: pieces of candy, pizza, gum; a cake cut into pieces; fractions: equal pieces of a whole; phrases «a piece of», «in one piece», «fall to pieces», «piece of cake» (very easy), «piece together»

examples

• She had 30 pieces of candy. tree →
• The pizza is cut into 8 pieces. tree →
• Each friend got 3 pieces of gum. tree →
• How many pieces are left? tree →
• The puzzle has 500 pieces. tree →
• Hand me a piece of paper. tree →
• The vase fell and broke into pieces. tree →
• That test was a piece of cake! tree →
• She played a piano piece at the concert. tree →
• The detective pieced the clues together. tree →
• "Chop him into pieces," said another. tree →

note

A counting word: «pieces of X» counts X. «cut into N pieces» makes equal parts; 1 piece of 8 is one eighth. Trap: the thing is after «of»; «pieces of candy» are candies. «Piece» sounds like «peace» (no war). Uncountable words need it: «a piece of advice», not «an advice».

In the corpora

• Knowing this helps you understand why a family's week is planned round a piece of paper on the fridge.
• Listening at the door usually gives you only scary half-pieces; asking «Is everything OK?» later works much better.
• It writes an answer piece by piece, each time choosing a likely next word.
• Schools have rules about AI; being open about what an AI did and didn't do on a piece of work is honest.
• Teachers often give a solo to the child most ready for that piece, and many swap solos around during the year.

Trees and pragmatics

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