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winnow

UK/ˈwɪnəʊ/US/ˈwɪnoʊ/
verbC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechneutral

Other forms: winnowing, winnowed

To winnow is to separate grain from chaff using moving air. Winnow the wheat.

The chaff is lighter and blows aside while the grain falls straight down. To winnow a list of applicants is the figurative use and means reducing it to the best.

Yann (talk) · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of winnow

  1. 1verbwinnowTo separate grain from chaff using moving air.C2

    “They would winnow on the ridge where the wind never dropped.”

winnow is a separating.

Where it comes from

Old English windwian comes from wind, since the wind did the work.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *wē- — to winnow, thresh

  2. Proto-Germanic

    *windwōną

  3. Proto-West Germanic

    *windwōn

  4. Old English

    windwian — to winnow, fan, ventilate

  5. Middle English

    wyndwen

  6. English, today

    winnow

Built from

  • *winþijaną · Proto-Germanic — to throw about, winnow

From Middle English wyndwen, from Old English windwian (“to winnow, fan, ventilate”), from Proto-West Germanic windwōn, from Proto-Germanic windwōną, winþijaną (“to throw about, winnow”), from Proto-Indo-European wē- (“to winnow, thresh”). Cognate with West Frisian wynje (“to winnow”), dialectal Dutch winden, winnen (“to winnow”), Middle High German winden (“to winnow”), Icelandic vinsa (“to pick out, weed”), Latin vannus (“a winnowing basket”). See fan, van.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Farm & Countryside

Practise this word

winnow in the wild

  • Chaffing and winnowing is a cryptographic technique to achieve confidentiality without using encryption when sending data over an insecure channel.

    Chaffing and winnowing

  • The chaff and grain are then separated by winnowing, and the chaff is discarded.

    Chaffing and winnowing

  • The winnow algorithm is a technique from machine learning for learning a linear classifier from labeled examples.

    Winnow (algorithm)

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.