triage

American  

[tree-ahzh] / triˈɑʒ /

noun

triages plural

1. the process of sorting victims, as of a battle or disaster, to determine medical priority in order to increase the number of survivors.

2. the determination of priorities for action.

   She began her workday with a triage of emails.

---

adjective

1. of, relating to, or performing the task of triage.

   a triage officer.

verb (used with object)

triaged, triaging

1. to act on or in by triage.

   to triage a crisis.

triage British  

/ ˌtriːˈɑːʒ, ˈtraɪ-, ˈtriːˌɑːʒ /

noun

1. (in a hospital) the principle or practice of sorting emergency patients into categories of priority for treatment

2. the principle or practice of sorting casualties in battle or disaster into categories of priority for treatment

3. 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

• triages
  plural

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.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

triage triages triaged triaging

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

AI can break these bottlenecks, allowing for much faster triage in hospitals or personalized tutoring for every student.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 10, 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

I told him to wait in the regular triage line for a physician's assistant.

From "Hole in My Life" by Jack Gantos

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

If the animal can be triaged nearby and stabilized, Rulli said, rescuers try to transport them to the institute’s hospital in Sausalito.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 2, 2024

"Five marines have been returned to Darwin for treatment with the remaining being triaged at the scene," said local police commissioner Michael Murphy.

From BBC ● Aug. 27, 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

Washington State Ferries triaged the issue by ranking routes in order of importance — some combination of total ridership and significance to the community.

From Seattle Times ● Mar. 1, 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

After landing at a cousin’s place in Long Beach, she began triaging: calling congregants, ensuring they made it out and finding a landing spot for the church in the immediate aftermath.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 12, 2025

One episode of 1990s BBC series Cardiac Arrest opens in a hectic triaging unit.

From BBC ● May 15, 2025

They say state-of-the-art large language models like GPT-4 could be useful for providing eye-related advice, diagnosis, and management suggestions in well-controlled contexts, like triaging patients, or where access to specialist healthcare professionals is limited.

From Science Daily ● Apr. 17, 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