sieve
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.
Other meanings
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.”
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.
Synonyms
- screen
Kinds of sieve
- riddle
Related words
- microsieve
- nanosieve
- sieveful
- sieveyer
- subsieve
- Brun sieve
- mind like a sieve
- brain like a sieve
- head like a sieve
- molecular sieve
- mole sieve
- mol sieve
Word history
From Old English "sife".
Where this comes from
This definition is adapted from “sieve” on Wiktionary, by its contributors; related-word lists use Open English WordNet (CC BY 4.0, based on Princeton WordNet), published under CC BY-SA 4.0. This page is published under the same licence.