| / English Dictionary |
MATES
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
A pair of people who live together
Example:
a married couple from Chicago
Synonyms:
Classified under:
Nouns denoting groupings of people or objects
Hypernyms ("mates" is a kind of...):
family; family unit (primary social group; parents and children)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "mates"):
power couple (a couple both of whom have high-powered careers or are politically influential)
DINK (a couple who both have careers and no children (an acronym for dual income no kids))
II. (verb)
Sense 1
Present simple (third person singular) of the verb mate
Context examples:
I crouched low among the bushes, for I knew from past experience that with a single cry the creature could bring a hundred of its loathsome mates about my ears.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
I learned, however, from his wife, who seemed a decent, poor soul, that he was only the assistant to Smollet, who of the two mates was the responsible person.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
When there's hard duty to be done with danger in it, he steps for'ard afore all his mates.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
Birds began singing in brake and copse: birds were faithful to their mates; birds were emblems of love.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
They bristled with unknown perils, and he gazed at them, fascinated, till their dazzle became a background across which moved a succession of forecastle pictures, wherein he and his mates sat eating salt beef with sheath-knives and fingers, or scooping thick pea-soup out of pannikins by means of battered iron spoons.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
For these two were old friends, old mates both at school and college, both thorough respectors of themselves and of each other, and what does not always follow, men who thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company.
(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
The virtual bird simulation was unique in allowing the researchers to identify the impact of a daily physiological stressor in the desert — heat — as birds leave the shade to forage for food or find mates.
(Collapse of desert bird populations likely due to heat stress from climate change, National Science Foundation)
The ability to sniff out mates with different immune genes could make their offspring's immune systems more diverse and able to fight more pathogens, said first author Kathleen Grogan, who did the research while working on her doctorate with professor Christine Drea at Duke.
(Lemurs can smell whether a mate's immune genes are a good match, National Science Foundation)
These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death and to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of discovery up his native river.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
Buck saw, and his mates saw, and they knew that this thing was very close to them.
(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)
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