winnow
verb

- to remove (something undesirable or unwanted); to reduce a group or list by removing less desirable elements — often used with out or down.

- to make a group of people or things smaller by removing those that are less good or less suitable.

- to remove (the unwanted coverings of seeds) from grain by throwing the grain into the air and letting the wind blow the unwanted parts away; also: to make a list of possible choices smaller by removing the less desirable choices.

Merriam-Webster, Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Britannica Dictionary

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WORD ORIGIN

winnow goes back to Old English windwian, a verb derived directly from wind — as in the moving air, not the act of turning. The connection is straightforward: you separate grain from chaff by letting the wind do the work. The Old English root shares ancestry with Old High German wintōn (to fan), Gothic diswinthjan, and Latin ventilāre (to fan, to air out) — itself from ventus, wind.

The word has been in continuous use in English since before 1150, making it one of the oldest verbs in the language. Its literal meaning — tossing threshed grain upward so that air carries away the lighter husks — was the standard farming technique across most of the world until mechanical threshing arrived in the 19th century.

The figurative leap came naturally. If wind separates what's light and useless from what's heavy and worth keeping, the same logic applies to ideas, people, candidates, evidence.

By Shakespeare's era the word was already being used metaphorically: "Winnow well this thought" appears in early modern texts as a call to examine an idea carefully before acting on it. Ecclesiasticus in the Apocrypha warns: "Winnow not with every wind."

The Latin ventus also gives us ventilate, vent, and fan. Wind, it turns out, has been doing the sorting for a very long time.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

axe, boil down, boil it down to the essentials, cherry-pick, clarify, clear out, comb through, cull, cut, cut the dead wood (through the clutter, to the chase), discard, distil, drop, edit, eliminate, eliminate the unwanted, exclude, extract, filter, flush out, focus, funnel, get down to brass tacks, isolate, jettison, narrow down, pare back, pare down, pick through, prune, purge, put through the wringer, reduce, refine, refine choices, root out, run the gauntlet, screen, screen out, select, separate, separate the men from the boys (the sheep from the goats,  the signal from the noise,  the wheat from the chaff), shed, shortlist, sieve, sieve out, sift, skim, sort, strain, streamline, strip back, take a fine-tooth comb, thin out, thin the herd, trim, trim the fat, weed out, whittle down, WINNOW, winnow down (out)

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SMUGGLE OWAD into an English conversation today, discuss this clip:

“We can expect to WINNOW hundreds of CVs before inviting anyone to interview.”

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