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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Sorting

Sort \Sort\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Sorted; p. pr. & vb. n. Sorting.]

  1. To separate, and place in distinct classes or divisions, as things having different qualities; as, to sort cloths according to their colors; to sort wool or thread according to its fineness.

    Rays which differ in refrangibility may be parted and sorted from one another.
    --Sir I. Newton.

  2. To reduce to order from a confused state.
    --Hooker.

  3. To conjoin; to put together in distribution; to class.

    Shellfish have been, by some of the ancients, compared and sorted with insects.
    --Bacon.

    She sorts things present with things past.
    --Sir J. Davies.

  4. To choose from a number; to select; to cull.

    That he may sort out a worthy spouse.
    --Chapman.

    I'll sort some other time to visit you.
    --Shak.

  5. To conform; to adapt; to accommodate. [R.]

    I pray thee, sort thy heart to patience.
    --Shak.

Wiktionary
sorting

n. 1 (senseid en ordering)ordering. 2 (senseid en categorizing)categorizing. vb. (present participle of sort English)

WordNet
sorting
  1. n. an operation that segregates items into groups according to a specified criterion; "the bottleneck in mail delivery it the process of sorting" [syn: sort]

  2. the basic cognitive process of arranging into classes or categories [syn: classification, categorization, categorisation]

  3. grouping by class or kind or size

Wikipedia
Sorting

Sorting is any process of arranging items systematically, and has two common, yet distinct meanings:

  1. ordering: arranging items in a sequence ordered by some criterion;
  2. categorizing: grouping items with similar properties.
Sorting (sediment)

Sorting describes the distribution of grain size of sediments, either in unconsolidated deposits or in sedimentary rocks. Very poorly sorted indicates that the sediment sizes are mixed (large variance); whereas well sorted indicates that the sediment sizes are similar (low variance).

The terms describing sorting in sediments - very poorly sorted, poorly sorted, moderately sorted, well sorted, very well sorted - have technical definitions, and semi-quantitatively describe the amount of variance seen in particle sizes. In the field, sedimentologists use graphical charts to accurately describe the sorting of a sediment using one of these words.

The degree of sorting may also indicate the energy, rate, and/or duration of deposition, as well as the transport process ( river, debris flow, wind, glacier, etc.) responsible for laying down the sediment. Sorting of sediments can also be affected by reworking of the material after deposition, for instance, by winnowing.

Well sorted rocks are generally porous, while poorly sorted rocks have low porosity.

Usage examples of "sorting".

The automatic safeguards flushed the entire contents of the bacterial sorting chamber out into space.

More and more she was convinced that the whole Pell operation was busywork, that Mazian might be doing precisely what she had advised all along, keeping the troops busy, keeping even his crews and captains busy, while the real operation here was that on Downbelow and what he proposed with the mines and short-haulers, the gathering of supplies, the repairs, the sorting of station personnel for identification and capture of all those fugitives who might surface and make takeover easy and cheap for Union.

Autumn was a time of sorting out the daffodil bulbs with their malathion stink, brushing their onionskin coatings from overly thick sweaters knit by two grandmothers who refused to speak English while they carded wool.

I imagined the big, sweaty messes sorting themselves out after a hard tab through the jungle.

There are some cops who remind Sonny of her Uncle Moosh, in whose home she lived for extended periods throughout her childhood, men who seem to be the calm center of the world, quietly and confidently sorting good from bad with the cheerful conviction that it is somehow worth the effort.

Sorting through the clothes, she started with the thicker overdress, not sure just how much scrubbing she should do on any one piece.

Lily tried to imagine it in the old days with the men working on the luggers, repairing gear, the activity in the sorting sheds, the babble of languages, the shouted orders of the pearling masters, the rattle of shells being stacked in bags, the tinkle of bicycle bells.

Canon Tallis was obviously familiar with every inch of the place, separating, sorting, explaining, ostensibly to Poly, but also for Adam.

Combine those two machines and they perform radiometric sorting, which separates preferred uranium from rock and lesser uranium.

There were five or six small boats pulled out, with folk sorting the catch and restowing their nets.

Finally he took a shaky breath, swiped his sleeve over his eyes, and began sorting faded stereographs from a time before humanity split atoms, walked on the moon, and died in the bloody, anonymous mire of special operations.

He recalled hearing something of the affair in church, but it was just as he was taking over his new post as bailiff, and his interest in affairs so far away was not as important as sorting out the tinners on the moors.

Running up a few steps into a warehouse stored with neat packages of dress goods, he encountered a couple of warehousemen engaged in sorting and classifying a consignment of fabrics just arrived from Bradford.

She had come to look forward to the hours spent sorting shards and talking about the Anasazi almost as much as she enjoyed working on the site itself.

There he directed the operations, quickly organizing and sorting out the problems of the most affected divisions: Rajshahi, Dhaka itself, Barisal, and finally Chittagong, which had its own special problems stemming from Kaptai Lake.