thousand

«thousand» in Mova's school dictionary: the number 1,000: ten hundreds — 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

number; noun (a thousand, thousands)

meaning for a pupil

1) A thousand is the number 1,000: ten hundreds. tree →

2) Thousands, or a thousand, can mean a very large number, not counted exactly. tree →

sense in the lessons

In maths, a thousand is a place value: in 4,326 the 4 means four thousands. 10 × 100 = 1,000; 1,000 × 1,000 = one million. A kilometre is a thousand metres and a kilogram is a thousand grams. Large numbers are grouped in threes. In stories, «a thousand times» means very many times. Phrases: «a thousand», «one thousand», «thousands of», «in their thousands», «a thousand times».

examples

• There are a thousand metres in a kilometre. tree →
• Two thousand people came to the match. tree →
• Write three thousand and five in digits: 3,005. tree →
• Thousands of birds flew south. tree →
• I've told you a thousand times! tree →
• The castle is about a thousand years old. tree →
• Round 4,672 to the nearest thousand: 5,000. tree →
• A thousand grams make one kilogram. tree →
• In a thousand years they will come! tree →

note

After a number, «thousand» has no -s: «five thousand», not «five thousands». «Thousands of» is used without a number before it. In maths problems «a thousand» = 1,000 and «thousands» as a place value is the fourth digit from the right. In the UK, 1,000 may be written 1 000 or 1000; the comma is a separator, not a decimal point.

In the corpora

• A deposit for buying a home is often tens of thousands of pounds, and saving for it can take years.
• So common questions, like why the sky is blue, get good answers, because thousands of people have explained them well.
• A big film can need hundreds or even thousands of people, and the credits at the end list them all.
• Emperor penguins find their partners and chicks among thousands of others by recognising their calls.
• Sharks lose teeth all the time and grow new ones from the rows behind, some tens of thousands in a lifetime.

Trees and pragmatics

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