filter
/ˈfɪltɚ/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: 4.28 in modern English
9
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A device which separates a suspended, dissolved, or particulate matter from a fluid, solution, or other substance; any device that separates one substance from another.
noun
Electronics or software that separates unwanted signals (for example noise) from wanted signals or that attenuates selected frequencies.
noun
Self-restraint in speech.
noun
A non-empty upper set (of a partially ordered set) which is closed under binary infima (a.k.a. meets).
noun
A translucent object placed in the light path of a camera to remove certain wavelengths (colors), or a computer program that simulates such an effect.
noun
An appearance-altering digital image effect.
Example Sentences
- "Then add four drops of crocodile semen, and pass the mixture through a filter."
- "He runs an email filter to catch the junk mail."
- "In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result. If the bumf arrived electronically, the take-up rate was 0.1%. And for online adverts the “conversion” into sales was a minuscule 0.01%. That means about $165 billion was spent not on drumming up business, but on annoying people, creating landfill and cluttering spam filters."
- "He's got no filter, and he's always offending people as a result."
- "These were women with enormous feelings and, almost always, no filter to mediate their expression of them."
- "The collection of cofinite subsets of ℝ is a filter under inclusion: it includes the intersection of every pair of its members, and includes every superset of every cofinite set."
Etymology
From Middle English filtre, from Medieval Latin filtrum (compare also Old French feutre (“felt; filter”)), from Frankish *filtir, from Proto-West Germanic *felt. See felt. Doublet of phin.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈfɪltɚ/
- British English: /ˈfɪltə/