🇬🇧 Sieve meaning: English Vocabulary Flash Card

A sieve is a kitchen tool that looks like a bowl or a flat circle with lots of tiny holes in it. It is usually made of metal or plastic mesh. You pour or rub food through it so that small pieces go through the holes and big pieces stay on top. People use a sieve to drain water from cooked pasta, wash rice, or make flour and sugar smooth by removing lumps. It helps separate what you want to keep from what you don’t want.

My brain is like a sieve in math class; the numbers go in and fall straight out the tiny holes.

I shook the cocoa powder through the sieve so hard that the cake, the counter, and my face all turned chocolatey.

When Dad rinsed rice in the sieve, half the rice stayed in and the other half tried to run away down the drain.

I used the sieve to rinse blueberries, and one blue rebel rolled off the edge like it was in an action movie.

I pretended the sieve was a knight’s helmet, but all the holes made me look like a space robot with air conditioning.

At the kitchen sink, Anna held a small metal sieve over a bowl. She poured flour slowly; the sieve caught dark lumps. Her son laughed, trying flour on his nose as she shook the sieve; fine white dust fell through the sieve and into the bowl. They both smiled, the messy job finished with the clean sieve.

This word is at the C2 level, which means it represents the highest mastery of English. It’s often used in specialized or highly formal contexts and helps you communicate with precision and subtlety, much like a native speaker.

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