Meaning & use
sifting
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Meanings
noununcountable
The act of shaking a powder or grain through a mesh so that fine parts fall through and lumps stay behind.
Grammar: Uncountable: the sifting of flour takes a minute.
Patterns
- the sifting of something
The sifting of the flour made the cake lighter.
Careful sifting separated the gold flakes from the sand.
Gardeners use repeated sifting to clean the soil.
noununcountablefigurative
Careful checking of a large amount of information to decide what matters and what does not.
Grammar: Usually uncountable and followed by of or through: sifting of the evidence.
Patterns
- the sifting of something
- sifting through something
The sifting of thousands of emails took the lawyers weeks.
Sifting through the applications was slow, tiring work.
Long sifting of the records finally turned up the missing letter.
verbtransitive or intransitive
Present participle of sift: passing material through a sieve, or searching through something carefully.
Grammar: As an -ing form it follows be or acts as a participle: she is sifting the flour.
Patterns
- sifting something
- sifting through something
She was sifting the icing sugar over the cake.
They are sifting through the wreckage for clues.
Sifting the data, he found one odd result.
Common combinations
- sifting through evidence
- Detectives spent days sifting through evidence from the scene.
- sifting of flour
- The sifting of flour removes lumps before baking.
- painstaking sifting
- Painstaking sifting of the soil revealed tiny beads.
- sifting through data
- Sifting through data is easier with the right software.
- sifting through the ashes
- They were sifting through the ashes for anything that survived.
Synonyms and how they differ
- sieving
- Sieving is the more common British word for passing food or liquid through a mesh, but it is rarely used figuratively.
- screening
- Screening means checking people or things to remove unsuitable ones, which is narrower than sifting through everything.
- combing
- Combing suggests searching every part of an area very thoroughly, whereas sifting focuses on separating good from bad.
- sorting
- Sorting arranges things into groups, while sifting removes the unwanted part.
Opposites
Word family
Commonly confused: sifting or shifting?
sifting vs shifting
Shifting means moving or changing position, and is a different word from sifting even though they sound close.
Practice
The historian's job involved the careful ___ of old letters to find reliable facts.
Choose one answer.
Sifting here means examining material to separate useful facts from the rest. Shifting is a tempting wrong answer because it sounds similar, but it means moving.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “sifting”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.