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triage

UK/ˈtɹiː.ɑːʒ/US/ˈtɹi.ɑʒ/
nounC1Common in everyday speech and writing · #6,578 of 15,258neutral

Triage is sorting the injured by who needs help soonest. Triage the casualties, a triage nurse, the triage tent.

The hardest part is deliberate: in a mass casualty the most urgent cases may be left untreated so that more people can be saved, which reverses the ordinary rule of medicine. It came from Napoleonic battlefield surgery. The French means sorting.

Vogler · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of triage

  1. 1nountriageSorting the injured by who needs help soonest.C1

    “At the scene of the crash, doctors carried out triage to decide who to treat first.”

triage is a sorting.

Where it comes from

French triage means a sorting, from trier, to sort. The medical use came from Napoleonic battlefield surgery.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *terh₁-

  2. French

    triage

  3. English, today

    triage

Built from

  • trier · French — to sort

Borrowed from French triage. French triage, from trier (“to sort”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Emergency & Rescue

Practise this word

triage in the wild

  • Patients who are brought in the emergency department are usually sent to triage first.

    Emergency physician

  • In first aid and triage, the walking wounded are injured persons who are of a relatively low priority.

    Walking wounded

  • The USB devices, known as triage keys, can be prepared in advance or in the field by selecting specific search criteria.

    ADF Solutions

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.

Related words

the trier family

try

triage — used about once every 2,009 pages · #6,578 · point at the bar for the others