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Winnow Has Old English Roots
As one Bob Dylan song goes, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” In fact, all you need to do is hold up a dandelion puff the next time there’s a breeze blowing, and watch the wind winnow the silver-white seeds from the rest of the head. Winnow and wind are both ancient words in English, and both share an ancestor with the Latin word for wind, ventus. Winnow first applied to the removal of chaff (seed coverings and other unwanted debris) from grain using the wind or other air current. This use was soon extended to describe the removal of anything undesirable or unwanted (a current example of this sense would be “winnowing out sensitive material”). People then began using the word for the selection of the most desirable elements (as in “winnowing down the list to the most qualified applicants”). Although these senses are more familiar today to most English users than the one used in processing grain, if you have trouble remembering any of them, just remember that the answer, friend, is blowing in the wind.
Examples of winnow in a Sentence
Jay Caspian Kang, The New Yorker, 11 Oct. 2024
Again, primarily due to the pattern-matching, plus due to the AI makers not being able to fully winnow out those kinds of gender biases from the intricate and interwoven web of their generative AI.
—Lance Eliot, Forbes, 18 Oct. 2024
In some cases, the candidate field is winnowed to two choices in our spring primary, where turnout is usually 40% lower than November, with even greater drops among voters of color and young people.
—Steve Chessin, The Mercury News, 25 Sep. 2024
The field of candidates would be winnowed down by a committee before being added to ballots.
—Kate Linthicum, Los Angeles Times, 9 Sep. 2024
See all Example Sentences for winnow 
Dictionary Entries Near winnow
Cite this Entry
“Winnow.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/winnow. Accessed 1 Dec. 2024.
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