sleep

«sleep» in Mova's school dictionary: to rest with your eyes closed and your mind switched off… — 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

verb, noun (sleep, sleeps, slept, sleeping)

meaning for a pupil

1) To sleep is to rest with your eyes closed and your mind switched off, as you do at night. tree →

2) Sleep is the state of sleeping, or how much rest you get. tree →

3) A sleepover is when a friend stays the night. tree →

4) «Go to sleep» means start sleeping; «put to sleep» can mean to give an animal a gentle death. tree →

sense in the lessons

Maths: hours of sleep, often added over nights or compared; times from bedtime to waking. Health: children need about 9 to 12 hours of sleep. Science: animals that sleep through winter hibernate. Everyday: fall asleep, sleep in, sleepy, sleeping bag, «sleep on it» (think about it overnight).

examples

• She sleeps 9 hours a night. tree →
• He slept from 9 pm to 7 am. tree →
• How many hours does he sleep in a week? tree →
• The baby sleeps 3 hours more than her brother. tree →
• Turn off your screen an hour before you go to sleep. tree →
• Bears sleep through the cold winter. tree →
• We slept in sleeping bags in the tent. tree →
• My leg has gone to sleep! tree →
• The old man went to sleep. tree →

note

Irregular: sleep, slept, slept. Hours a night × nights = total; times from bedtime to waking need counting across midnight. Trap: going from pm to am crosses midnight (9 pm to 7 am is 10 hours). Asleep (adjective) vs sleep (verb).

In the corpora

• Night shifts mean working through the night and sleeping in the day; nurses, drivers, bakers and warehouse workers often do them.
• A parent sleeping on the sofa for a few nights may mean a disagreement, or something simple like snoring or a bad back.
• When a person dies, their body stops working for ever; it is not sleep, and they do not come back.
• Being dead means the body has stopped working for ever; it is not the same as sleep.
• Staying up too late makes adults tired the next day, and children's sleep matters even more for growing and learning.

Trees and pragmatics

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