filter
Forms
- Plural
- filters
- present (v1)
- filter
- past (v2)
- filtered
- past participle (v3)
- filtered
- present participle
- filtering
- 3rd person singular
- filters
Definitions
1.A device which separates a suspended, dissolved, or particulate matter from a fluid, solution, or other substance; any device that separates one substance from another.
- Then add four drops of crocodile semen, and pass the mixture through a filter.
2.Electronics or software that separates unwanted signals (for example noise) from wanted signals or that attenuates selected frequencies.
3.Any item, mechanism, device, or procedure that acts to separate or isolate.
- He runs an email filter to catch the junk mail.
4.Self-restraint in speech.
- He's got no filter, and he's always offending people as a result.
- These were women with enormous feelings and, almost always, no filter to mediate their expression of them.
1.To sort, sift, or isolate.
- This strainer should filter out the large particles.
- Receivers often incorporate digital equalisers to 'mop up' slight intersymbol interference after initial filtering at the receiver.
- “You have probably never seen anything like this before, Mr. Toler. It is baleen, or if you prefer it, whalebone, taken from the mouth of the bowhead whale. It is used by the whale to filter its food.”
2.To diffuse; to cause to be less concentrated or focused.
- The leaves of the trees filtered the light.
3.To move slowly or gradually; to come or go a few at a time.
- The crowd filtered into the theater.
4.To pass through a filter or to act as though passing through a filter.
- The water filtered through the rock and soil.
Frequency
Overall
Rare· #4546
By learning goal
- Everyday conversation
- Rare
- General reading & writing
- Rare
- Academic
- Rare
- Literature
- Rare
Etymology
From Middle English filtre, from Medieval Latin filtrum (compare also Old French feutre (“felt; filter”)), from Frankish *filtir, from Proto-West Germanic *felt.
See felt.
Doublet of phin.