Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A utensil of wire mesh or closely perforated metal or plastic, used for straining, sifting, ricing, or puréeing.
- intransitive verb To pass through a sieve.
- intransitive verb To use a sieve; sift.
from The Century Dictionary.
- To cause the finer parts of to pass through or as if through a sieve; sift.
- noun An instrument for separating the finer from the coarser parts of disintegrated matter, by shaking it so as to force the former through meshes too small for the latter to pass. Sieves are made in many forms for a great variety of uses. See hair-siere, scarce, screen, bolting-cloth, etc.
- noun Something for other use shaped like or in some way resembling the common circular sieve.
- noun A wide sheepskin-covered hoop used in some localities for holding wool.
- noun In calico-printing, a cloth extending over a vat which contains the color.
- noun Figuratively, a thing which lacks closeness of texture, or a person who lacks closeness of disposition; especially, a very frank or free-spoken person; one who lets out all that he knows.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A utensil for separating the finer and coarser parts of a pulverized or granulated substance from each other. It consist of a vessel, usually shallow, with the bottom perforated, or made of hair, wire, or the like, woven in meshes.
- noun A kind of coarse basket.
- noun (Bot.) cribriform cells. See under
Cribriform .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A device to separate larger objects from smaller objects, or to separate
solid objects from aliquid . - noun 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.
- verb To
strain ,sift orsort using a sieve.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb examine in order to test suitability
- noun a strainer for separating lumps from powdered material or grading particles
- verb check and sort carefully
- verb separate by passing through a sieve or other straining device to separate out coarser elements
- verb distinguish and separate out
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
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Examples
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A sieve is a mechanism, specifically, a device which selects or separates from among that which already exists.
Assessing Causality 2008
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If it leaks like a sieve, is there anything you can do about it?
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If it leaks like a sieve, is there anything you can do about it?
Guest Post: Personal Factor Four: Organizing Real Environmental Action with the Internet 2006
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With each side conceding four last Tuesday it looked on the cards anyway, though neither manager licked his lips too publicly in advance lest it smacked of the colander calling the sieve holey.
Hereford fail to see the funny side as Barnet emerge with the points Jeremy Alexander at Underhill 2010
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Only, it's a selective sieve, which is the way of most sieves, now that I think on it.
"My weakness laid bare, as people stop and stare." readingthedark 2009
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The scientists say the key to their molecular sieve, which is made using microfabrication technology, is the uniform size of the nanopores through which proteins are separated from biological fluids.
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The mind of a sieve is a beautiful thing to waste :
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WILLIS: But you are leaking money like a sieve is the problem.
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In order to protect it on Oscar night, he says, every hole in the so-called sieve will have to be sealed off.
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The leaves are now taken back to the hot pans and spread out in them as before, being again turned with the naked hand, and when hot taken out and rolled; after which, they are put into a drying basket and spread on a sieve, which is in the centre of the basket, and the whole placed over a charcoal fire.
oroboros commented on the word sieve
In mathematics a sieve is used to find prime numbers. Click here for an interesting demonstration.
February 14, 2007