winter
part of speech
noun (winter, winters); verb (winter — spend the winter, rare)
meaning for a pupil
1) The coldest season of the year, between autumn (fall) and spring. tree →
2) As a verb, to spend the winter somewhere: "Birds winter in the south." tree →
sense in the lessons
In science, seasons come from the tilt of the Earth: winter is when your half of the Earth leans away from the Sun, so days are short and cold. In the Northern Hemisphere (USA, UK, Canada, Ireland) winter is December to February; in Australia and New Zealand it is June to August. Some animals hibernate or migrate. Phrases: in winter, winter coat, winter sports, mid-winter, wintry.
examples
- Winter is the coldest season. tree →
- It snows here in winter. tree →
- Bears hibernate in winter. tree →
- In Australia, winter is in June, July and August. tree →
- Wear warm clothes in winter. tree →
- The days are short in winter. tree →
- Christmas is in winter in Canada, but in summer in New Zealand. tree →
- Some birds fly south for the winter. tree →
- A hard winter followed this summer. tree →
note
Season names are not capitalised in English: "winter", not "Winter". Seasons are opposite in the north and south of the Earth. Winter is not cold because the Earth is farther from the Sun; it is because of the tilt.
In the corpora
- Brown bears, including grizzlies, catch salmon at waterfalls in autumn to build up fat before winter.
- The North American wood frog can freeze solid in winter, with its heart stopped, and thaw and hop away in spring.
- Reindeer eyes change from golden in summer to blue in winter, which helps them see in the long dark winter.
- Mammoths had a fatty hump on their backs that stored energy for the hard winters.
- Some ants guard aphids from ladybirds and stroke them for sweet honeydew, and some keep aphid eggs in the nest over winter.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «winter» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.