piston

«piston» in Mova's school dictionary: a short solid cylinder that moves up and down or in and… — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 1 sentence of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

noun (a piston, pistons)

meaning for a pupil

1) A piston is a short solid cylinder that moves up and down or in and out inside a tube, pushed by pressure; it is a key part of engines and pumps. tree →

2) (informal) «Like pistons» describes something moving fast up and down, like legs running. tree →

sense in the lessons

In science and D&T (design and technology) lessons, pistons show how pressure and force make movement: in car engines, burning fuel pushes pistons, which turn the wheels; in syringes and bike pumps, a piston pushes air or liquid. Children make simple hydraulic models with syringes.

examples

• The piston moves up and down inside the engine. tree →
• A bike pump has a piston inside. tree →
• Pistons turn the crankshaft in a car. tree →
• We made a moving arm with syringes as pistons. tree →
• Steam pushed the pistons of the old train. tree →
• His legs went like pistons as he raced to the finish. tree →
• A syringe is a simple piston and cylinder. tree →
• The huge limbs moved as steadily as pistons, eight feet to each stride, and the wrinkled skin of the elbow points rustled. tree →

note

Countable: pistons. Not to be confused with «pistol» (a gun). Pronounced «PISS-tun».

In the corpora

• Steam engines burned coal to boil water, and the steam pushed pistons that powered factories, trains and ships.

Trees and pragmatics

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