ribbon
part of speech
noun (ribbon, ribbons)
meaning for a pupil
1) A ribbon is a long, narrow strip of cloth used for tying, decorating or wrapping. tree →
2) A ribbon can be a prize or badge: a blue ribbon for first place. tree →
3) A ribbon is any long narrow strip: a ribbon of road. tree →
4) «Cut to ribbons» means cut into many pieces. tree →
sense in the lessons
In maths: a length measured in inches, feet or meters; cut into equal pieces or used for bows; ribbon left. In everyday life: wrapping presents, hair ribbons, ribbon-cutting at an opening. In school fairs and shows: first-prize blue ribbons (USA); rosettes (UK). In stories: «a ribbon of river wound through the valley».
examples
- She has a ribbon 3 meters long. tree →
- Each bow needs 25 cm of ribbon. tree →
- He cut the ribbon into 6 equal pieces. tree →
- How much ribbon is left? tree →
- She tied her hair with a red ribbon. tree →
- We wrapped the present and tied it with ribbon. tree →
- His pumpkin won a blue ribbon at the fair. tree →
- The mayor cut the ribbon to open the new library. tree →
- The road was a thin ribbon across the desert. tree →
- It had pink ribbons to tie up its sleeves, so the Queen saw at once it was a girl. tree →
note
Cutting a ribbon into equal pieces is division; pieces used are subtracted from the length. Trap: change meters to centimeters before mixing them (1 m = 100 cm). Bows needed × length per bow = ribbon used.
In the corpora
- A snail eats with a ribbon covered in thousands of tiny teeth that scrapes food like a file.
- Mila keeps every letter in a shoebox with a ribbon round it.
- Imagine a long green ribbon of fields on a huge sandy map: that ribbon is where nearly all Egyptians lived.
- A ribbon 3 metres long is 300 centimetres; cutting off 45 centimetres leaves 300 − 45 = 255 centimetres.
- A ribbon is 60 cm. 1/3 is cut off: 60 / 3 = 20 cm, and 40 cm remain.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «ribbon» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.