sheep
part of speech
noun (sheep, sheep)
meaning for a pupil
1) A sheep is a farm animal with a thick woolly coat. A sheep has 4 legs. tree →
2) Farmers keep sheep for wool, meat and milk. tree →
3) A person who just copies others is sometimes called a sheep. tree →
sense in the lessons
Maths: animals counted on a farm; their legs (4 each) or wool. Science and farming: a baby sheep is a lamb, a male is a ram, a female is a ewe; shearing the wool. Everyday: counting sheep to fall asleep; New Zealand and Australia have very many sheep. Stories: the boy who cried wolf, Little Bo-Peep.
examples
- A farmer has 45 sheep. tree →
- Each sheep gives 3 kg of wool. tree →
- 12 sheep are in the barn and the rest are in the field. tree →
- How many legs do 6 sheep have? tree →
- The sheepdog rounded up the sheep. tree →
- The farmer shears the sheep in spring. tree →
- When I can't sleep, I count sheep. tree →
- A lamb is a baby sheep. tree →
- "Whose sheep are these?" he asks. tree →
note
Plural is the same: one sheep, ten sheep (not «sheeps»). Animals counted; 4 legs each, so legs = sheep × 4. Trap: «sheep» is the same for one and many — look at the verb (is/are) or the number. Meat from sheep is lamb or mutton.
In the corpora
- In experiments sheep learned to recognise the faces of other sheep and of some famous people from photos.
- Picture a hillside: a shepherd whistles, the dog swings left round the flock, and three hundred sheep move as one.
- Calm, slow handling keeps sheep less stressed; stressed sheep scatter and can hurt themselves.
- Sheepdog trials are real competitions where dog and shepherd move sheep through gates and into a pen.
- Musk ox underwool, called qiviut, is warmer than sheep's wool, and people collect it when it falls out in spring.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «sheep» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.