sieve

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English[edit]

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Sieve in cooking

Etymology[edit]

From Middle English sive, syfe, from Old English sife, sibi (“sieve”), from Proto-Germanic *sibi (“sieve”), from Proto-Indo-European *seyp-, *seyb- (“to pour, sieve, strain, run, drip”). Akin to German Sieb, Dutch zeef, Slavic *sito (Russian сито (sito), сев (sev), сеять (sejatʹ)).

Pronunciation[edit]

Noun[edit]

sieve (plural sieves)

  1. A device to separate, in a granular material, larger particles from smaller ones, or to separate solid objects from a liquid.
    Use the sieve to get the pasta from the water.
  2. 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.
    • 2010, Luke Mastin, “20TH CENTURY MATHEMATICS - ROBINSON AND MATIYASEVICH”, www.storyofmathematics.com, accessed on 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.
    Given a list of consecutive numbers starting at 1, the Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm will find all of the prime numbers.
  3. (obsolete) A kind of coarse basket.
    (Can we find and add a quotation of Simmonds to this entry?)

Derived terms[edit]

Translations[edit]

Verb[edit]

sieve (third-person singular simple present sieves, present participle sieving, simple past and past participle sieved)

  1. To strain, sift or sort using a sieve.

Translations[edit]

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