sieve

Plural: sieves

Noun

• a strainer for separating lumps from powdered material or grading particles
• A device with a mesh, grate, or otherwise perforated bottom to separate, in a granular material, larger particles from smaller ones, or to separate solid objects from a liquid.
• A process, physical or abstract, that arrives at a final result by filtering out unwanted pieces of input from a larger starting set of input.
• A kind of coarse basket.
• A person, or their mind, that cannot remember things or is unable to keep secrets.
• An intern who lets too many non-serious cases into the emergency room.
• A collection of morphisms in a category whose codomain is a certain fixed object of that category, which collection is closed under precomposition by any morphism in the category.

Verb

Verb Forms: sieved, sieving, sieves

• To separate fine matter from coarse using a perforated utensil.
• examine in order to test suitability
• check and sort carefully
• separate by passing through a sieve or other straining device to separate out coarser elements
• distinguish and separate out
• To strain, sift or sort using a sieve.
• To concede; let in

Examples

• Given a list of consecutive numbers starting at 1, the Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm will find all of the prime numbers.
• Use the sieve to get the pasta from the water.
• You must SIEVE through your tiles, carefully looking for high-scoring letter combinations.

Synonyms

screen, screen out, sift, sort, strain

Related Words

baleen

Anagrams of sieve