SIEVE

sieve, screen

(noun) a strainer for separating lumps from powdered material or grading particles

sieve, sift

(verb) distinguish and separate out; “sift through the job candidates”

sift, sieve, strain

(verb) separate by passing through a sieve or other straining device to separate out coarser elements; “sift the flour”

sieve, sift

(verb) check and sort carefully; “sift the information”

screen, screen out, sieve, sort

(verb) examine in order to test suitability; “screen these samples”; “screen the job applicants”

Source: WordNet® 3.1

Etymology

Noun

sieve (plural sieves)

A device with a mesh bottom to separate, in a granular material, larger particles from smaller ones, or to separate solid objects from a liquid.

Coordinate terms: sifter, sile, riddle

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.

(obsolete) A kind of coarse basket.

(colloquial) A person, or their mind, that cannot remember things or is unable to keep secrets.

(category theory) A collection of morphisms in a category whose codomain is a certain fixed object of that category, which collection is closed under pre-composition by any morphism in the category.

Verb

sieve (third-person singular simple present sieves, present participle sieving, simple past and past participle sieved)

To strain, sift or sort using a sieve.

(sports) To concede; let in

Source: Wiktionary

Sieve, n. Etym: [OE. sive, AS. sife; akin to D. zeef, zift, OHG. sib, G. sieb. sq. root151a. Cf. Sift.]

1. A utensil for separating the finer and coarser parts of a pulverized or granulated substance from each other. It consist of a vessel, usually shallow, with the bottom perforated, or made of hair, wire, or the like, woven in meshes. "In a sieve thrown and sifted." Chaucer.

2. A kind of coarse basket. Simmonds. Sieve cells (Bot.), cribriform cells. See under Cribriform.

Source: Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary 1913 Edition