sieve

UK/sɪv/US/sɪv/

nounB1+2 meanings Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,460 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: sieves

A sieve is the fine metal net you shake flour through to remove lumps. A fine sieve, pass it through a sieve, a memory like a sieve.

It separates by size: the fine part falls through and the lumps stay behind. A strainer is its coarser cousin, for draining the liquid off food, though the two words are used loosely. A memory like a sieve means one that keeps nothing. The spelling keeps the i-before-e rule; it is the sound that surprises: the ie says the short i of give, not the ee of believe. It is a verb too: you sieve the flour.

Definitions of sieve

1nounsieveA fine net used to remove lumps from flour or a sauce.B1+
“Push the lumpy sauce through a sieve with the back of a spoon.”
- Said"Pass me the sieve; there are lumps in this."
- WrittenIcing fell from the sieves in a slow white snow over the tarts.
- UsedSieve the flour into the bowl from a height to get air into it.
- ContrastA sieve, not a colander. A colander drains pasta; a sieve is fine net for powders and lumps. colander →
- Not thisA tea strainer is not a sieve. A sieve is wide and for the mixing basin.
- SimplyPut the sugar in the sieve. Shake it.
Patternpass / push sth through a sieve · a fine / metal sieve · sieve the flour · sift
2verbsiftTo shake flour or another powder through a fine net to take out the lumps.B2
“Sieve the icing sugar over the cake just before you serve it.”

Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.

sieve is a tool.

Also accepted in games: strainer

Remember it

s-IEVE → g-IVE · same sound, spelled with IE

Picture a sieve with two tiny hands that love to give. Tip in a cup of flour full of lumps and it gives the fine white powder away, a pinch at a time, falling like snow into the bowl, while every lump stays held in the mesh. Gives the fine, keeps the lumps: sieve.

hooks ontogive

Where it comes from

Old English sife names the tool, from a Germanic root meaning to pour or sift. Sift is the verb from it.

Proto-Indo-European
*seyp-
Proto-West Germanic
*sibi — sieve
Old English
sife
Middle English
sive
English, today
sieve

Built from

*seyb- · Proto-Indo-European — to pour, sieve, strain, run, drip

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, сев, се́ять).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in In the Kitchen

Practise this word

sieve in the wild

In mathematics, the sieve of Eratosthenes is an ancient algorithm for finding all prime numbers up to any given limit.
Sieve of Eratosthenes
One of a number of prime number sieves, it is one of the most efficient ways to find all of the smaller primes.
Sieve of Eratosthenes
In number theory, a lucky number is a natural number in a set which is generated by a certain "sieve".
Lucky number
In the same work they also suggested calling another sieve, "the sieve of Josephus Flavius" because of its similarity with the counting-out game in the Josephus problem.
Lucky number
The term sieve was first used by the Norwegian mathematician Viggo Brun in 1915.
Sieve theory

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Definitions of sieve

1nounsieveA fine net used to remove lumps from flour or a sauce.B1+

“Push the lumpy sauce through a sieve with the back of a spoon.”

Said"Pass me the sieve; there are lumps in this."
WrittenIcing fell from the sieves in a slow white snow over the tarts.
UsedSieve the flour into the bowl from a height to get air into it.
ContrastA sieve, not a colander. A colander drains pasta; a sieve is fine net for powders and lumps. colander →
Not thisA tea strainer is not a sieve. A sieve is wide and for the mixing basin.
SimplyPut the sugar in the sieve. Shake it.

Patternpass / push sth through a sieve · a fine / metal sieve · sieve the flour · sift

2verbsiftTo shake flour or another powder through a fine net to take out the lumps.B2

“Sieve the icing sugar over the cake just before you serve it.”

Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.

sieve is a tool.

Also accepted in games: strainer