pigeon
part of speech
noun (a pigeon, pigeons)
meaning for a pupil
1) A grey (or brown and white) bird with a small head and a round body, very common in towns and cities. tree →
2) (homing/carrier pigeon) A pigeon trained to fly home over long distances, once used to carry messages. tree →
sense in the lessons
In science and history: pigeons can find their way home from far away; in wars they carried messages. In towns: don't feed pigeons where it's not allowed, and wash your hands after touching them. Phrases: «homing pigeon», «carrier pigeon», «pigeon-toed» (feet turned inwards), «pigeonhole» (a small box for letters).
examples
- Pigeons were pecking at crumbs in the square. tree →
- A carrier pigeon carried the message across the sea. tree →
- Homing pigeons can fly home from hundreds of kilometres away. tree →
- The pigeon cooed on the windowsill. tree →
- Please don't feed the pigeons here. tree →
- Put your letters in the teacher's pigeonhole. tree →
- And close upon them followed three pigeons. tree →
note
Countable. Spelling: «-geon» like «surgeon»; said PIJ-in. Pigeons and doves are the same family; doves are usually smaller and white.
In the corpora
- Pigeons are smarter than they look: they can tell people's faces apart and remember who chased them and who fed them.
- City pigeons often get string or hair tangled round their toes, which can cut into the foot; wildlife rescuers carefully remove it.
- Pigeons can tell people apart by their faces, and in experiments they even learned to tell paintings by different artists apart.
- Calling pigeons rats with wings is unfair: they have lived alongside people for thousands of years, and people bred them on purpose.
- Feeding huge crowds of pigeons with bread makes too many pigeons, and birds packed in crowds spread mess and illness more easily.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «pigeon» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.