sort
Pronunciation
  • (British) IPA: /sɔːt/
  • (America) IPA: /sɔɹt/
Noun

sort (plural sorts)

  1. A general type.
  2. Manner; form of being or acting.
    • 1910, Emerson Hough, chapter II, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, OCLC 639762314 ↗, page 0147 ↗:
      Carried somehow, somewhither, for some reason, on these surging floods, were these travelers, of errand not wholly obvious to their fellows, yet of such sort as to call into query alike the nature of their errand and their own relations. It is easily earned repetition to state that Josephine St. Auban's was a presence not to be concealed.
  3. (obsolete) Condition above the vulgar; rank.
  4. (informal) A person evaluated in a certain way (bad, good, strange, etc.).
  5. (dated) Group, company.
  6. (Australia, informal) A good-looking woman.
  7. An act of sorting.
    I had a sort of my cupboard.
  8. (computing) An algorithm for sorting a list of items into a particular sequence.
    Popular algorithms for sorts include quicksort and heapsort.
  9. (typography) A piece of metal type used to print one letter, character, or symbol in a particular size and style.
  10. (mathematics) A type.
  11. (obsolete) Chance; lot; destiny.
  12. (obsolete) A full set of anything, such as a pair of shoes, or a suit of clothes.
Synonyms Translations Translations Translations
  • French: triage, tri (but the phrase "to have a sort of" is more idiomatically translated by the verb "trier", to sort, or "ranger", to sort, to tidy)
  • Portuguese: ordenação
  • Russian: сортиро́вка
  • Spanish: ordenación
Translations
  • French: tri
  • Portuguese: ordenador
  • Russian: сортиро́вка
Translations Verb

sort (sorts, present participle sorting; past and past participle sorted)

  1. (transitive) To separate items into different categories according to certain criteria that determine their sorts.
    Synonyms: categorize, class, classify, group
    Sort the letters in those bags into a separate pile for each language.
  2. (transitive) To arrange into some sequence, usually numerically, alphabetically or chronologically.
    Synonyms: order, rank
    Sort those bells into a row in ascending sequence of pitch.
  3. (transitive) To conjoin; to put together in distribution; to class.
  4. (transitive, obsolete) To conform; to adapt; to accommodate.
  5. (transitive, obsolete) To choose from a number; to select; to cull.
  6. (intransitive) To join or associate with others, especially with others of the same kind or species; to agree.
  7. (intransitive) To suit; to fit; to be in accord; to harmonize.
  8. (British, colloquial, transitive) To fix (a problem) or handle (a task).
    Synonyms: sort out
  9. (British, colloquial, transitive) To attack physically.
    Synonyms: sort out
    If he comes nosing around here again I'll sort him!
Translations Translations Translations
  • Portuguese: arrumar
  • Russian: (intransitive) разбира́ться



This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.041
Offline English dictionary