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# vole

«vole» in Mova's school dictionary: **a small, plump rodent like a mouse, with a short tail…** — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 3 sentences of Mova's corpora that use it.

### part of speech

noun (a vole, voles)

### meaning for a pupil

A vole is a small, plump rodent like a mouse, with a short tail, small ears and a blunt nose, that lives in fields, woods and riverbanks. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/V/vole/#m1)

### sense in the lessons

In nature lessons voles are an important part of food chains: owls, kestrels, foxes, weasels and stoats eat lots of them. The water vole is a British riverbank animal that has become rare because of American mink and loss of habitat; Ratty in «The Wind in the Willows» is really a water vole. Phrases: «field vole», «bank vole», «water vole».

### examples

- A barn owl swooped down and caught a vole. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/V/vole/#x1)
- Voles have shorter tails than mice. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/V/vole/#x2)
- Ratty in «The Wind in the Willows» is really a water vole. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/V/vole/#x3)
- Water voles dig burrows in riverbanks. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/V/vole/#x4)
- We found vole tunnels in the long grass. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/V/vole/#x5)
- Voles eat grass, roots and seeds. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/V/vole/#x6)
- The kestrel hovered, looking for voles. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/V/vole/#x7)

### note

Plural «voles». Trap: a vole is not a mole (a mole digs underground and eats worms) and not exactly a mouse (shorter tail, rounder face). Rhymes with «hole».

### In the corpora

- [A barn owl family can eat thousands of mice and voles in a year, so farmers put up owl boxes.](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/291-bees-worms-and-soil-the-hidden-helpers-of-our-food/19/)
- [Pull it apart with tweezers and you can count the skulls of the mice and voles it ate.](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/302-how-owls-work-silent-wings-turning-heads-pellets-and-owl-myths/5/)
- [A great grey owl can plunge through deep snow to grab a vole it has only heard.](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/302-how-owls-work-silent-wings-turning-heads-pellets-and-owl-myths/9/)

### Trees and pragmatics

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