Sieve

Pronunciation

• IPA: /sɪv/
• Rhymes: -ɪv

Origin

From Old English sife, Proto-Germanic *sibi. Akin to German Sieb, Dutch zeef, *sito (Russian сито, сев, сеять).

Full definition of sieve

Noun

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.
• 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.
3. Given a list of consecutive numbers starting at 1, the Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm will find all of the prime numbers.
4. (obsolete) A kind of coarse basket.

Derived terms

Verb

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