Skip to main content
PlainSpell

sieve

/sɪv/noun, verb

sieve is a noun meaning “A device with a mesh, grate, or otherwise perforated bottom to separate, in a granular material, larger particles from smaller ones, or to separate…” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled S-I-E-V-E and has one syllable, and it appears 1.0 times per million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of sieve is sieves.

What does sieve mean?

noun

  1. 1

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

    Near-synonyms: sifter, strainer, temse

  2. 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.

    Given a list of consecutive numbers starting at 1, the Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm will find all of the prime numbers.

  3. 3

    obsoleteA kind of coarse basket.

  4. 4

    colloquialA person, or their mind, that cannot remember things or is unable to keep secrets.

  5. 5

    derogatoryslangAn intern who lets too many non-serious cases into the emergency room.

  6. 6

    A collection of morphisms in a category whose codomain is a certain fixed object of that category, which collection is closed under precomposition by any morphism in the category.

verb

  1. 1

    To strain, sift or sort using a sieve.

  2. 2

    To concede; to let in.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce sieve?

  • /sɪv/

Sieve has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-sieve.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of sieve

  • sieves plural, present, singular, he/she/it
  • sieving participle, present
  • sieved participle, past

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is sieve?

Sieve appears 1.0 times per million words in written English, the 28,918th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Sieve in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

LanguageWords
Frenchtamis, crible, passoire (device to separate larger objects from smaller…), tamiser, sasser (to strain, sift or sort using a sieve)
GermanSieb (device to separate larger objects from smaller…), sieben, durchsieben (to strain, sift or sort using a sieve)
Portuguesepeneira, coador, crivo (device to separate larger objects from smaller…), coar, peneirar (to strain, sift or sort using a sieve)
Spanishcedazo, criba, cribo, tamiz, harnero, zaranda (device to separate larger objects from smaller…)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does sieve come from?

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 (síto), сев (sev), се́ять (séjatʹ)).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).