Meaning

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

  "Use the sieve to get the pasta from the water."

• 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."

• A kind of coarse basket.

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

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

Meaning

• To strain, sift or sort using a sieve.

• To concede; let in