tall
part of speech
adjective (tall, taller, tallest)
meaning for a pupil
1) Tall means high from the bottom to the top: a giraffe is very tall. tree →
2) Tall is used to give height: he is 150 cm tall. tree →
3) A tall story (tall tale) is one that is hard to believe. tree →
4) In informal speech, "tall" can be short for "at all", as in "not saying anything at all". tree →
sense in the lessons
Maths: height measures and comparisons (how tall, taller than, the tallest); ordering by height; bar graphs of heights. Science: the tallest animals, trees and buildings. Everyday: «stand tall» (be proud and brave).
examples
- The tree is 12 meters tall. tree →
- Tom is 5 cm taller than Ben. tree →
- Who is the tallest? tree →
- How tall is the tower? tree →
- Giraffes are the tallest animals on Earth. tree →
- Line up from shortest to tallest. tree →
- Grandpa told a tall story about a fish as big as a boat. tree →
- Sunflowers can grow taller than a man. tree →
note
Comparative taller, superlative tallest. «Taller than» compares heights: add the difference to get the taller one. Trap: «Ben is 5 cm shorter than Tom» means subtract from Tom, even though no «taller» appears. Use «tall» for people, trees and buildings; «high» for mountains and things far above the ground.
In the corpora
- The Mona Lisa is about 77 centimetres tall and 53 centimetres wide; Guernica is almost 8 metres wide.
- Long legs let cranes wade in marshes and tall grass, and a long bill probes the mud for food.
- Buttress roots spread out like walls around many rainforest trees and hold the tall tree up in thin soil.
- Wheat is a tall grass whose seeds, the grains, are ground into flour.
- People in the Netherlands grew about 20 centimetres taller on average over about 150 years, mostly thanks to better food and health.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «tall» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.