English Explanatory Dictionary

sieve

English dictionary entry

Meanings

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.

Pronunciation

/sɪv/ en-us-sieve.ogg

Word forms

sieve sieves sieving sieved

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)).

Synonyms

sifter strainer temse screen

Related words

baleen

Derived words

brain like a sieve Brun sieve cleaning sieve head like a sieve larger sieve large sieve leak like a sieve memory like a sieve microsieve mind like a sieve molecular sieve mole sieve mol sieve nanosieve ranch-sieve range-sieve Selberg sieve sieve cell sieveful sieveless sievelike sieve number sieve of Eratosthenes sieve plate sieve set sieve theory sieve-tube element sieveyer sievish subsieve Turán sieve resieve sievable sieve out siever
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