sieve

Meaning

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. (obsolete) A kind of coarse basket.
4. (colloquial) A person, or their mind, that cannot remember things or is unable to keep secrets.
5. (slang) An intern who lets too many non-serious cases into the emergency room.
6. 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.

sift

sizing screen

pour off

sieve out

small gong

hairsieve

mesh screen

medium size

Frequency

Pronounced as (IPA)

/sɪv/

From Middle English sive, syfe, from Old English sife, from Proto-West Germanic *sibi (“sieve”), from Proto-Indo-European *seyp-, *seyb- (“to pour, sieve, strain, run, drip”). Akin to German Sieb, Dutch zeef, Proto-Slavic *sito (Russian си́то (síto), сев (sev), се́ять (séjatʹ)).

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