swallow

«swallow» in Mova's school dictionary: To make food, drink or something else go down your throat… — 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 (swallow, swallows, swallowed, swallowing); noun (a swallow, swallows — a bird; a swallow — one act of swallowing)

meaning for a pupil

1) To make food, drink or something else go down your throat into your stomach. tree →

2) To move your throat as if swallowing, for example when nervous. tree →

3) A noun: a small bird with long pointed wings and a forked tail that flies fast and catches insects. tree →

4) To believe something too easily, or to hide a feeling: «swallow your pride». tree →

sense in the lessons

In science: the body unit — you chew, then swallow, and food goes down the food pipe (oesophagus) to the stomach. In safety: small children may swallow coins, batteries, magnets or medicine — tell an adult at once; button batteries are very dangerous. In nature lessons: swallows migrate to warm countries in winter. Phrases: swallow it whole, swallow hard, hard to swallow, a swallow's nest.

examples

• Chew your food well before you swallow it. tree →
• My little brother swallowed a coin, so Mum called the doctor. tree →
• It hurts to swallow when you have a sore throat. tree →
• Snakes swallow their food whole. tree →
• He swallowed hard and walked on stage. tree →
• Swallows build mud nests under the roof. tree →
• In autumn the swallows fly south. tree →
• That story is hard to swallow. tree →
• One swallow does not make summer. tree →

note

Regular verb: swallowed. Two meanings that look the same: the action (swallow food) and the bird (a swallow). If someone swallows something dangerous (battery, magnet, cleaning liquid, pills), tell an adult straight away and do not wait for them to feel ill.

In the corpora

• Cassowaries swallow fruit whole and spread the seeds of over 200 kinds of plants in their droppings.
• A bottlenose dolphin has around 80 to 100 cone-shaped teeth, gets only one set for life, and swallows fish whole.
• A frog swallows prey whole and pulls its eyeballs down into its head to help push the food down its throat.
• Pufferfish swallow water fast to blow up into a prickly ball, and many also have strong poison.
• Sea turtles eat jellyfish, and floating plastic bags look like jellyfish, so turtles sometimes swallow plastic, which can block their stomachs.

Trees and pragmatics

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