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sort

[sawrt]

noun

a particular kind, species, variety, class, or group, distinguished by a common character or nature: to develop a new sort of painting; nice people, of course, but not really our sort.

character, quality, or nature: young people of a nice sort.

an example of something that is undistinguished or barely adequate: He is a sort of poet.

manner, fashion, or way: We spoke in this sort for several minutes.

Printing.

any of the individual characters making up a font of type.

characters of a particular font that are rarely used.

EXPAND

an instance of sorting.

COLLAPSE

verb (used with object)

to arrange according to sort, kind, or class; separate into sorts; classify: to sort socks; to sort eggs by grade.

to separate or take from other sorts or from others (often followed by out): to sort the good from the bad; to sort out the children's socks.

to assign to a particular class, group, or place (often followed by with, together, etc.): to sort people together indiscriminately.

10.

Scot. to provide with food and shelter.

11.

Computers. to place (records) in order, as numerical or alphabetical, based on the contents of one or more keys contained in each record. Compare key¹ (def. 19).

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Sort is one of our favorite verbs.

So is lollygag. Does it mean:

to run away hurriedly; flee.

to spend time idly; loaf.

LEARN MORE FUN, UNUSUAL VERBS WITH WORD DYNAMO...

verb (used without object)

12.

Archaic. to suit; agree; fit.

13.

British Dialect. to associate, mingle, or be friendly.

Verb phrase

14.

sort out,

evolve; develop; turn out: We'll just have to wait and see how things sort out.

to put in order; clarify: After I sort things out here, I'll be able to concentrate on your problem.

Idioms

15.

of sorts,

of a mediocre or poor kind: a tennis player of sorts.

of one sort or another; of an indefinite kind.

Also, of a sort.

16.

out of sorts,

in low spirits; depressed.

in poor health; indisposed; ill.

in a bad temper; irritable: to be out of sorts because of the weather.

Printing. short of certain characters of a font of type.

17.

sort of, Informal. in a way; somewhat; rather: Their conversation was sort of tiresome.

Origin:
1200–50; (noun) Middle English < Middle French sorte < Medieval Latin sort- (stem of sors) kind, allotted status or portion, lot, Latin: orig., voter's lot; (v.) Middle English sorten to allot, arrange, assort (< Middle French sortir) < Latin sortīrī to draw lots, derivative of sors; later senses influenced by the noun and by assort

Related forms

sort·a·ble, adjective

sort·a·bly, adverb

sort·er, noun

mis·sort, verb

sub·sort, noun

EXPAND

sub·sort, verb

sub·sort·er, noun

un·der·sort, verb (used with object)

un·sort, verb (used with object)

un·sort·a·ble, adjective

COLLAPSE

Can be confused: kind, sort, type (see usage note at kind²; see usage note at type).

Synonyms
1. family, order, race, rank, character, nature.

Usage note
See kind².

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
Cite This Source

Link To sort

Example Sentences

Most browsers sort bookmarks in the order they are added, but they can.

Is there some sort of standard wording for a faculty member's.

The sea bottom is gray and plain, a sort of anti-Hawaii, a place located far from holidays and honeymoons.

EXPAND

Most browsers sort bookmarks in the order they are added, but they can.

Is there some sort of standard wording for a faculty member's.

The sea bottom is gray and plain, a sort of anti-Hawaii, a place located far from holidays and honeymoons.

Computer programs that can sort images by color, detail and texture could help restore medieval frescoes ruined in an earthquake.

It is a sort of accidental tour of the crooked, down and out or unlucky.

The particular way each vine climbs determines what sort of support you'll need to provide.

Adults have the capacity and the right to choose for themselves what sort of images they wish to see.

The challenge is deciding how to sort life into those categories.

Each of the skulls also bears cut marks made by stone tools in what appear to be the result of some sort of post-death ritual.

As she wonders what sort of sickness the other riders might be spreading, her immune system.

I've been to a number of field sites, but this one was sort of a life-changing trip for me.

All you need to start vermiculture is a box with a cover of some sort and a pound or more of worms.

These developments suggest a steady move toward a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.

The notes ripple through the empty church, but it's not quite the sort of glorified.

New study confirming warming trend is news sort of.

It's sort of amazing that one of the iconic national places to visit has such a mysterious.

Most lawns are watered by sprinklers--either the hose-end sort or those that are part of a fixed system.

She reminds me a lot of myself-she's the sort of kid.

My first experience with that sort of wake-up call was a few years ago in my first year of teaching.

Use your geography savvy to sort out the stories of four kids caught in natural disasters.

It doesn't bode well if you would rather sort socks than go out on a date or if.

Despite this missing fragments, however, it is clear what sort of dinosaur it was.

If pests of this sort are a nuisance for you, you may want to clear away their hiding places periodically.

It's the sort of experience that can stick in their heads and help foster an interest in government and politics.

People expect to hear soaring yet predictable rhetoric, the sort found in fund-raising.

We're not really paying the true price of what it costs to produce items and that's sort of the unfairness of globalization.

And the suspicion is that maybe some of these symbiotic microbes are contributing to the sort of processing of bee bread.

The thick fat on their chests acts as a sort of armor, but the results of this battle for status still aren't pretty.

I've sort of been cheating on you and writing a bunch of gardening stuff on our other garden blog.

Snubster, a website created to poke fun at social-discovery sites and isolate annoying people, develops into its own sort of hub.

The committee sort of expects that all of the members of the faculty are decent teachers and researchers.

Males use the tusks to battle one another, but the ivory has also attracted violence of a far more dangerous sort.

The receiver has to sort through this mess and figure out which signal to lock on to.

The alder leaf is full of holes caused by a marauding insect and is not the sort you would collect and.

Inky splotches across its mammoth leaves give this new elephant's ear a gothic sort of glamour.

The one thing she wished it did have was some sort of locking mechanism:.

Literary translation is an odd sort of art, if it can be called an art at all.

Recycling bins may be color-coded to help you sort your recyclables.

Very cool tech, but relatively simple- the best sort of combination for this type of application.

How this mask attained treasure status in the first place is a tale of another sort.

Pole beans, peas, and indeterminate tomatoes also need to be trained on some sort of structure.

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged.

It is sort of the equivalent of tenure insofar as the librarian is not required to seek further promotion but may choose to do.

It's kind of an interesting topic in a sort of way that it's not the usual thing that you see sometimes in books.

Socialism results are equal misery, not some sort of economic utopia.

It's a sort of halfway house between captivity and reintroduction.

We have always tried our best to line our wooden veggie bed walls with some sort of barrier in case of chemical leeching.

The information collected in your timeline is dependent on what sort of data about yourself you want collected over time.

Also, whether there are any free or low-cost online learning options that award some sort of certificate or degree.

Wilson hopes that by seeing this sort of research in action more people will be enthused and attracted into science.

Chimps have been seen using sticks to kill bushbabies in a tree, sort of stabbing at them.

After the rice has cooled, machines remove the hulls and sort the grains by size.

He's sort of on a mission to turn the world into one big sub-irrigated container.

So there's this sort of dark matter that the public can't see.

They believed that there must be some sort of biological spring or catapult that launches the tongue on its culinary quest.

What is more, the researchers found a sort of sweet spot for their soundings, a depth where the sunspot signal is strongest.

Hot dogs and typewriters-generic things people sort of recognize.

The shiny black insect nestled in the petals of a white rose, seen above, is rather gorgeous in a sinister sort of way.

Some municipalities require residents to sort recyclables, but rules vary by city and state.

All the examples here bring to mind the same sort of simple explanations.

People are also suggesting a sort of multiple stress disorder.

They sort of slump down in the box, making a low, miserable hum.

Normally there's some sort of slight bulge below you.

Being an audio podcast about human perception, it's sort of the perfect match.

Coordination and a technical advantage of a different sort.

Well, this is sort of the same idea on a grander scale.

The results reinforce the theory that dyslexia arises from some sort of deficit in processing language sounds.

Whenever the trait developed, it may have given the white bears some sort of advantage.

While you return calls, you sort e-mail and snail mail.

Perhaps there was some sort of urban legend about paramedics taking care of the person with the nicest underthings first.

Let your wife too think positive and don't ever feed this sort of research to her.

The sort of thing that used to happen only in fiction can hardly compare to what's in the news today.

Although, it could have als been that my brain was sort of in a blank alert state.

There is no reason to believe that sort of chemical reaction can't happen here as well.

Recent work in experimental philosophy has found this same sort of effect in numerous other areas.

COLLAPSE

Collins

World English Dictionary

sort (sɔːt)

—n
1.	a class, group, kind, etc, as distinguished by some common quality or characteristic
2.	informal type of character, nature, etc: he's a good sort
3.	a more or less definable or adequate example: it's a sort of review
4.	(often plural) printing any of the individual characters making up a fount of type
5.	archaic manner; way: in this sort we struggled home
6.	after a sort to some extent
7.	of sorts, of a sort
	a. of an inferior kind
	b. of an indefinite kind
8.	out of sorts not in normal good health, temper, etc
9.	informal sort of
	a. (adverb) in some way or other; as it were; rather
	b. (sentence substitute) used to express reservation or qualified assent: I’m only joking. Sort of

—vb (foll by with)
10.	(tr) to arrange according to class, type, etc
11.	(tr) to put (something) into working order
12.	(tr) to arrange (computer information) by machine in an order convenient to the computer user
13.	informal to supply, esp with drugs
14.	archaic, dialect or (intr; foll by with, together, etc) to associate, as on friendly terms
15.	archaic (intr) to agree; accord

[C14: from Old French, from Medieval Latin sors kind, from Latin: fate]



'sortable

—*adj*

'sortably

—*adv*

'sorter

—n

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
Cite This Source

Etymonline

Word Origin & History

sort

c.1380, from O.Fr. sorte "class, kind," from L. sortem (nom. sors) "lot, fate, share, portion, rank, category," from PIE base *ser- "to line up" (cf. L. serere "to arrange, attach, join;" see series). The sense evolution in V.L. is from "what is allotted to one by fate,"

EXPAND

to "fortune, condition," to "rank, class, order." Out of sorts "not in usual good condition" is attested from 1621, with lit. sense of "out of stock."

sort

1358, "to arrange according to type or quality," from O.Fr. sortir "allot, sort, assort," from L. sortiri "draw lots, divide, choose," from sors (see sort (n.)). In some senses, the verb is a shortened form of assort.

COLLAPSE

FOLDOC

Computing Dictionary

sort definition

1. To arrange a collection of items in some specified order. The items - records in a file or data structures in memory - consist of one or more fields or members. One of these fields is designated as the "sort key" which means the records will be ordered according to the value of that field. Sometimes a sequence of key fields is specified such that if all earlier keys are equal then the later keys will be compared. Within each field some ordering is imposed, e.g. ascending or descending numerical, lexical ordering, or date.
Sorting is the subject of a great deal of study since it is a common operation which can consume a lot of computer time. There are many well-known sorting algorithms with different time and space behaviour and programming complexity.
Examples are quicksort, insertion sort, bubble sort, heap sort, and tree sort. These employ many different data structures to store sorted data, such as arrays, linked lists, and binary trees.
2. The Unix utility program for sorting lines of files.
Unix manual page: sort(1).
(1997-02-12)

American Heritage

Idioms & Phrases

sort

see after a fashion (sort); all kinds (sorts) of; bad sort; it takes all sorts; kind (sort) of; nothing of the kind (sort); of sorts; out of sorts.

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