Meaning & use
winnow
To separate grain from chaff using wind or air; more broadly, to carefully sort the best or most relevant parts from a larger group.
See it in a sentence
Farmers used to winnow wheat by tossing it into the air on a windy day.
The committee winnowed hundreds of applications down to a shortlist of five finalists.
A note on using this word
The figurative sense of winnow, meaning to narrow down options, is now more common in everyday writing than the original farming sense.
Words with a similar meaning
siftsort
Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.
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