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sieve

Pronunciation: /sɪv/

The English word “sieve” has 8 meanings listed here.

noun

  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. A kind of coarse basket.
  4. A person, or their mind, that cannot remember things or is unable to keep secrets.
  5. 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.

verb

  1. To strain, sift or sort using a sieve.
  2. To concede; to let in.

Etymology

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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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.