sieve
/sɪv/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.00 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
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.
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.
Example Sentences
- "Near-synonyms: sifter, strainer, temse"
- "Use the sieve to get the pasta from the water."
- "The philosopher Demonax said of two dunces, 'one appeared to be milking a he-goat while the other was holding a sieve for him.'"
- "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."
- "To be a sieve was to lack clinical judgment, courage, and group loyalty all at once."
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)).
Origin
Word Breakdown
Usage
Inflected Forms
Derived Forms
Phrases
brain like a sieve
Brun sieve
cleaning sieve
head like a sieve
larger sieve
large sieve
leak like a sieve
memory like a sieve