upside
part of speech
noun (the upside, upsides); in the phrase "upside down" (adverb, adjective)
meaning for a pupil
1) "Upside down" means with the top at the bottom and the bottom at the top. tree →
2) "Upside down" also means in a big mess: "The room was turned upside down." tree →
3) The upside is the good side of something that is mostly bad. tree →
sense in the lessons
In maths, turning a shape or number upside down is a rotation of half a turn; 6 upside down looks like 9. In science, a lens can make an upside-down image. In everyday life, "the upside" is the good part. Phrases: upside down, turn upside down, the upside is.
examples
- Bats sleep upside down. tree →
- You're holding the map upside down! tree →
- The burglar turned the house upside down. tree →
- A 6 upside down looks like a 9. tree →
- The upside of rain is that the garden gets watered. tree →
- Flip the pancake upside down. tree →
- He turned it upside down, but nothing came out, which surprised him very much. tree →
note
"Upside" is rarely used alone except as "the upside" (the good side); the opposite is "the downside". "Upside down" (also written "upside-down" before a noun: an upside-down cake). In maths, upside down is a half-turn (180 degrees) rotation, which is not the same as a mirror reflection.
In the corpora
- A flamingo feeds with its head upside down in the water, filtering tiny food through comb-like edges of its bill.
- Long curved claws hook over branches, so a sloth can hang upside down for hours, even asleep, without tiring.
- Small ants can carry many times their own weight, and weaver ants were photographed holding about 100 times their weight upside down.
- A bat sleeps all day upside down without effort, because its toes lock shut on their own.
- Madagascar had giant lemurs, some as heavy as a grown man or heavier, and some hung upside down in trees like sloths.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «upside» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.