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# abacus

«abacus» in Mova's school dictionary: **a frame with rows of beads that slide along wires or…** — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples.

### part of speech

noun (an abacus; plural abacuses or abaci)

### meaning for a pupil

1) An abacus is a frame with rows of beads that slide along wires or rods, used for counting and doing sums. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/A/abacus/#m1)

2) In buildings, an abacus is the flat slab on top of a column (architecture word). [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/A/abacus/#m2)

### sense in the lessons

In maths lessons, the abacus helps children see place value: each row is a place (ones, tens, hundreds), and moving beads shows adding, taking away and carrying. In history, abacuses were used in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome and China; the Chinese suanpan and Japanese soroban are still used. Phrases: «count on an abacus», «move the beads».

### examples

- We used an abacus to add 27 and 15. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/A/abacus/#x1)
- On the abacus, the top row shows hundreds and the bottom row shows ones. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/A/abacus/#x2)
- Some children in Japan learn very fast mental maths with a soroban abacus. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/A/abacus/#x3)
- The abacus was used long before calculators. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/A/abacus/#x4)
- Move three beads to the left to add three. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/A/abacus/#x5)
- My little brother counts the coloured beads on his toy abacus. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/A/abacus/#x6)

### note

Plural: abacuses (most common) or abaci (formal). Say «AB-a-kus», stress on the first syllable. Maths: on a place-value abacus, each bead on the tens rod is worth 10, so 3 beads on tens and 4 on ones = 34; ten beads on one row are swapped for one bead on the next row up (carrying).

### Trees and pragmatics

[Every meaning and example of «abacus» parsed by Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/A/abacus/), each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.