sieve
noun
- tool for breaking or separation of solid materials
verb
- act of separating materials
Wiktionary
Pronunciation: /sɪv/
noun
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)).
- 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.
“Near-synonyms: sifter, strainer, temse”
“Use the sieve to get the pasta from the water.”
- 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.
“Given a list of consecutive numbers starting at 1, the Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm will find all of the prime numbers.”
“Among, ^([sic]) his other achievements, Matiyasevich and his colleague Boris Stechkin also developed an interesting “visual sieve” for prime numbers, which effectively “crosses out” all the composite numbers, leaving only the primes.”
- 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.
“To be a sieve was to lack clinical judgment, courage, and group loyalty all at once.”
- 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
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)).
- To strain, sift or sort using a sieve.
“Serpulorbis grandis feeds on plankton that it seives ^([sic]) from the water like a clam does.”
- To concede; to let in.
“This was their seventh defeat out of nine finals, including five in a row, and the second half was a chastening experience for the Serie A champions, culminating in them sieving more goals in one match than in the rest of the competition put together.”