1 [VN] to put flour or some other fine substance through a SIEVE/SIFTER:
Sift the flour into a bowl.
2 ~ (through) sth to examine sth very carefully in order to decide what is important or useful or to find sth important:
[VN] We will sift every scrap of evidence. * Computers are being used to sift the information. * [V] Crash investigators have been sifting through the wreckage of the aircraft.
3 [VN] ~ sth (out) from sth to separate sth from a group of things:
He sifted the relevant data from the rest. * She looked quickly through the papers, sifting out from the pile anything that looked interesting.
PHRASALVERBS
sift sth<->out
1 to remove sth that you do not want from a substance by putting it through a SIEVE:
Put the flour through a sieve to sift out the lumps.
2 to separate sth, usually sth you do not want, from a group of things:
We need to sift out the applications that have no chance of succeeding.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for sift is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is sift a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, sift is tagged as verb.
Does sift appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — sift appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
