stale
part of speech
adjective (stale, staler, stalest)
meaning for a pupil
1) Stale food, especially bread or cake, is old, dry and not fresh any more. tree →
2) Stale air is old and stuffy, not fresh, like in a room with closed windows. tree →
3) Stale news or jokes are old and boring because people have heard them too many times. tree →
4) In hunting, a stale trail is an old scent that has grown weak and is hard to follow. tree →
sense in the lessons
In everyday life, bread goes stale if it is left out; crisps go stale in an open bag. In science, bread goes stale because it loses water; fresh air helps us concentrate. Phrases: «go stale», «stale bread», «stale air».
examples
- The bread went stale because we left the bag open. tree →
- Let's open a window; the air in here is stale. tree →
- We fed the stale crusts to the ducks. tree →
- Seal the cereal box, or it will go stale. tree →
- That joke is stale; everyone knows it. tree →
- Stale biscuits are soft instead of crunchy. tree →
- The room smelled stale after the holiday. tree →
- He shall follow the new trail, and the stale trail, and the mixed trail, with a clear eye! tree →
note
Adjective: stale, staler, stalest. Stale is not the same as mouldy or rotten: stale food is old and dry but may still be safe; mouldy food is not safe to eat. Opposite: «fresh». Feeding lots of bread to ducks is not good for them.
In the corpora
- Walking sharks can survive for hours with very little oxygen when a rock pool gets warm and stale at low tide.
- Bread goes stale as its starch slowly lines up and squeezes out water; warming it in the oven softens it for a while.
- «Sure the cake was stale!» At a christening they end up singing together, crying, and it's over.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «stale» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.