triage
Americannoun
-
the process of sorting victims, as of a battle or disaster, to determine medical priority in order to increase the number of survivors.
-
the determination of priorities for action.
She began her workday with a triage of emails.
adjective
verb (used with object)
noun
-
(in a hospital) the principle or practice of sorting emergency patients into categories of priority for treatment
-
the principle or practice of sorting casualties in battle or disaster into categories of priority for treatment
-
the principle or practice of allocating limited resources, as of food or foreign aid, on a basis of expediency rather than according to moral principles or the needs of the recipients
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of triage
First recorded in 1925–30; from French: “a sorting,” from tri(er) “to sort” ( cf. try) + -age -age
Explanation
Grouping patients based on the severity of their injuries and the likelihood of their survival is called triage. In a triage situation, urgent cases are seen by doctors first, and non-life-threatening emergencies go last. You can also apply the sorting and prioritizing of triage to more general situations. If you're overwhelmed with homework, you can perform triage by organizing it into subjects and prioritizing assignments based on their due dates. The word triage comes from the French word trier meaning to sort. Although the medical sense is now the most common, it wasn't used that way until World War One.
Vocabulary lists containing triage
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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:
They made it to a nearby clinic, San Antonio de Catia La Mar, where the besieged staff was implementing emergency triage, prioritizing those with life-threatening conditions.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 30, 2026
Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and others also offer cheaper versions of their flagship models, and Factory and others have developed systems to help companies triage queries and steer some tasks to cheaper options.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 29, 2026
They say that their staff are helping to isolate and triage children arriving at hospitals where such measures are lacking.
From BBC ● May 27, 2026
He said Target’s turnaround appeared to be working, but that it needed to “move on from triage to full-scale growth.”
From MarketWatch ● May 20, 2026
One of the engineers on the base kept bringing Vietnamese children into triage who needed treatment.
From "Boots on the Ground: America's War in Vietnam" by Elizabeth Partridge
The company developed a metric called “Mean Time to Adapt,” which measures how quickly an organization identifies, triages and fixes vulnerabilities once discovered.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 10, 2026
The team preps trees when possible ahead of advancing flames and triages those that have faced the fire.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 7, 2021
For every patient that telemedicine triages, avoiding the need for an in-person appointment, another slot is opened up for someone who may have needed it more.
From Slate ● Mar. 17, 2020
He triages each based on how solvable they are.
From Washington Times ● Oct. 10, 2015
In the months following the shooting, university counselors provided more than 700 mental health triages, spoke to classes, visited survivors in the hospital, fielded 120 calls from parents and provided other services.
From Washington Post ● Apr. 13, 2012
Diaz triaged resources, cutting specialty units in favor of patrol.
From Seattle Times ● May 29, 2024
Maui County Fire Chief Brad Ventura at a news conference spoke of firefighting resources having to be triaged Tuesday to “what was most important at the time.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 14, 2023
"This is the only hospital still accepting injured and we're getting more every day. Some go into surgery, others get triaged, but the capacity is very low," he said.
From Reuters ● Apr. 19, 2023
"I was at Bronx Lebanon Hospital and there were 23 ambulances sitting there with patients waiting to be triaged."
From Salon ● Jan. 4, 2023
Many were triaged in the war zone and then treated at a military medical facility in Landstuhl, Germany, before being flown to the United States.
From "Becoming" by Michelle Obama
They found that DeepSeek handled these tasks as well as Anthropic’s Sonnet and was good at email triaging in particular.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 12, 2026
A triaging system meant to house the most needy forced housing providers to deal with more burdensome tenants.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 10, 2025
One episode of 1990s BBC series Cardiac Arrest opens in a hectic triaging unit.
From BBC ● May 15, 2025
A quick way to measure methane leaks is essential for triaging newly discovered UOWs, and also for efforts to plug known wells.
From Science Daily ● Dec. 4, 2024
The lightness he'd felt fled him, and he began the rotten business of triaging his in-box.
From Eastern Standard Tribe by Doctorow, Cory
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.
