separate

«separate» in Mova's school dictionary: As an adjective, not joined or together; apart or… — 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

adjective (separate — pronounced SEP-rut); verb (separate, separates, separated, separating — pronounced SEP-a-rate)

meaning for a pupil

1) As an adjective, not joined or together; apart or different: two separate rooms, separate piles. tree →

2) As a verb, to move things or people apart, or to divide a mixture into its parts. tree →

3) To stop living together, as when parents separate. tree →

sense in the lessons

In science, we separate mixtures: a sieve separates big bits from small ones, filtering separates sand from water, a magnet separates iron from other things, and evaporation separates salt from water. In maths, separate things into groups to divide or sort them. In everyday life, recycling means separating paper, plastic and glass; in the kitchen, keep raw meat separate from other food for safety. In families, when parents separate it is never the child's fault. Phrases: "separate from", "keep separate", "separate into", "go their separate ways", "separate the eggs".

examples

• Separate the red counters from the blue ones. tree →
• Use a filter to separate the sand from the water. tree →
• My sister and I have separate bedrooms. tree →
• Keep raw chicken separate from salad. tree →
• A magnet can separate iron filings from sand. tree →
• We separate our rubbish for recycling. tree →
• The teacher separated the two boys who were chatting. tree →
• Write each answer on a separate line. tree →
• Then Rasalu said, "Separate the millet seed from the sand." tree →

note

Spelling trap: separate has "a rat" in it — sep-A-RAT-e, not "seperate". The adjective and verb are spelled the same but said differently. Noun: separation. In maths, "separate 20 sweets into 4 equal groups" means divide: 20 ÷ 4 = 5.

In the corpora

• Separating means parents stop living together as a couple; it may lead to a divorce, but not always straight away.
• "It was reported that" separates what we know ourselves from what we heard.
• Separating facts, reports and guesses keeps you from spreading rumours as facts.
• The Great Barrier Reef off Australia is the largest coral reef system on Earth, made of thousands of separate reefs.
• Stegosaurus lived about 150 million years ago, so more time separates Stegosaurus from T. rex than separates T. rex from us.

Trees and pragmatics

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