sieve
From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
See also: Sieve
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)).
Pronunciation
Noun
sieve (plural sieves)
- 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.
- 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.
- 2010, Luke Mastin, “20TH CENTURY MATHEMATICS - ROBINSON AND MATIYASEVICH”, in www.storyofmathematics.com, retrieved 2013-09-08:
- 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.
- (obsolete) A kind of coarse basket.[1]
- (colloquial) A person, or their mind, that cannot remember things or is unable to keep secrets.
- (medicine, slang, derogatory) An intern who lets too many non-serious cases into the emergency room.
- 1997, Leo Galland, The Four Pillars of Healing, page 25:
- To be a sieve was to lack clinical judgment, courage, and group loyalty all at once.
- (category theory) 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.
Derived terms
- brain like a sieve
- Brun sieve
- head like a sieve
- larger sieve
- large sieve
- leak like a sieve
- memory like a sieve
- mind like a sieve
- molecular sieve, mole sieve, mol sieve
- Selberg sieve
- sieve cell
- sieveless
- sievelike
- sieve number
- sieve of Eratosthenes
- sieve plate
- sieve set
- sieve theory
- sieve-tube element
- sievish
- Turán sieve
Translations
device to separate larger objects from smaller ones or from liquids
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process that filters out unwanted pieces of input
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See also
Verb
sieve (third-person singular simple present sieves, present participle sieving, simple past and past participle sieved)
- To strain, sift or sort using a sieve.
- (sports) To concede; let in
- 2017 June 3, Daniel Taylor, “Real Madrid win Champions League as Cristiano Ronaldo double defeats Juv”, in The Guardian (London):
- 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.
Translations
to strain, sift or sort using a sieve
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- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
References
- 1858, Peter Lund Simmonds, The Dictionary of Trade Products
Further reading
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