sieve
Americannoun
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an instrument with a meshed or perforated bottom, used for separating coarse from fine parts of loose matter, for straining liquids, etc., especially one with a circular frame and fine meshes or perforations.
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a person who cannot keep a secret.
verb (used with or without object)
noun
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a device for separating lumps from powdered material, straining liquids, grading particles, etc, consisting of a container with a mesh or perforated bottom through which the material is shaken or poured
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rare a person who gossips and spreads secrets
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a very poor memory
verb
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to pass or cause to pass through a sieve
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to separate or remove (lumps, materials, etc) by use of a sieve
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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sievesimple
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sievessimple
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have sievedperfect
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has sievedperfect
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am sievingprogressive
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are sievingprogressive
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is sievingprogressive
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have been sievingperfect progressive
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has been sievingperfect progressive
Past
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sievedsimple
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had sievedperfect
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was sievingprogressive
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were sievingprogressive
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had been sievingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of sieve
First recorded before 900; Middle English sive, Old English sife; cognate with Dutch zeef, German Sieb; cf. sift
Compare meaning
How does sieve compare to similar and commonly confused words? Explore the most common comparisons:
Explanation
A sieve is a mesh strainer used to separate lumps and clumps from the fine material. Sieves are handy for everything from sifting flour to prospecting for gold — anything where you need to separate the big from the small. If you’re an archaeologist, you've probably used various sorts of sifters and shakers to sieve through the soil to recover even the tiniest artifacts. If your interests run more to building sandcastles, you’ve probably got a sieve in your beach bag, along with the shovels and pails. If you keep forgetting things, you can describe your "mind as a sieve," since it doesn’t seem to hold much.
Vocabulary lists containing sieve
Words to Know Before You Defrost the Bird
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Pestle, Sieve, and Whisk: Useful Words for Cooking Tools
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"The Tragedy of Macbeth," Vocabulary from Act 1
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
"It was filthy, dirty and it leaked like a sieve for many years," he said in a White House video about the plan.
From Barron's ● Apr. 25, 2026
The average American home is about as airtight and well-insulated as a metal sieve.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 21, 2025
If you want a silky texture, strain through a fine-mesh sieve.
From Salon ● Jun. 2, 2025
For decades, I’ve heard that the border is little better than a sieve through which millions of migrants easily pass.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 16, 2024
His hands would be swollen and painful from sifting the heavy, wet soil through his sieve.
From "Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina" by Michaela DePrince
They will also provide equipment including magnets and sieves for the citizen scientists.
From BBC ● Apr. 4, 2026
To save the gobies from that fate, scientists and citizen volunteers arrived on Jan. 17 and used giant nets that served as sieves to retrieve the fish that rarely exceed a length of two inches.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 18, 2025
Human beings do not exist in vacuums; we are sieves for the experiences, cultures and socioeconomic systems that entrap us.
From Salon ● Aug. 18, 2019
This kind of filtering is very different from the sieves and nets that human technology uses to separate out particles of a certain size.
From New York Times ● Jan. 9, 2017
“We shoveled gravel through sieves for seven full hours with a half-hour break for lunch.”
From "Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow" by Susan Campbell Bartoletti
The fermented BSG is then dried, ground into a powder, sieved, and spun in a centrifuge to separate the protein, which would float to the top from the rest of the mixture.
From Science Daily ● Apr. 11, 2024
The disturbed soil removed from the trenches is carefully sieved.
From BBC ● Jul. 31, 2023
In 1962 Heinz Stolp, a researcher in Berlin, was searching for new viruses when he ran out of the filters that sieved them from his samples.
From Scientific American ● Sep. 5, 2022
Other condiments shunned by connoisseurs but enjoyed by many are sieved egg yolks, finely chopped egg whites, and minced onion or fresh-snipped chives.
From Seattle Times ● Dec. 4, 2021
He and the others sieved out insects and added water as needed.
From "The House of the Scorpion" by Nancy Farmer
The successful sieving of the fuel molecules is achieved via selective proton transfers due to steric hindrance on holey graphene sheets that have chemical functionalization and act as proton-exchange membranes.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 22, 2023
“Children recognize sand as a creative material suitable for pouring, scooping, sieving, raking, and measuring,” it said.
From Washington Times ● Nov. 4, 2021
After sieving out the large particles, they filtered the water to collect the eDNA.
From Washington Post ● Apr. 30, 2021
We recycled and reused pretty much everything from stationery to clothes, bed linen, old tights for sieving my dad's homemade wine, vegetable peelings and so on.
From BBC ● Apr. 16, 2016
The stirring, sieving, settling, and bailing were repeated any number of times, until Min was satisfied with the residue.
From "A Single Shard" by Linda Sue Park
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
