Idiom idiom
sift out
Meaning
To isolate or identify one particular thing from a collection that includes less relevant things.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“I sift out the bad apples from the basket.”
“The manager needs to sift out the best candidates from the pile of applications before the interviews start.”
“Researchers must carefully sift out the relevant data from the massive collection of noise to find a meaningful pattern in the results.”
Anchors to
Last updated August 10, 2026