Sieve
Pronunciation
- IPA: /sɪv/
- Rhymes: -ɪv
Origin
From Old English sife, Proto-Germanic *sibi. Akin to German Sieb, Dutch zeef, *sito (Russian Ñито, Ñев, ÑеÑÑ‚ÑŒ).
Full definition of sieve
Noun
sieve
(plural sieves)- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- (obsolete) A kind of coarse basket.