| 1. | 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. |
| 2. | character, quality, or nature: young people of a nice sort. |
| 3. | an example of something that is undistinguished or barely adequate: He is a sort of poet. |
| 4. | manner, fashion, or way: We spoke in this sort for several minutes. |
| 5. | Printing.
|
| 6. | an instance of sorting. |
| 7. | to arrange according to sort, kind, or class; separate into sorts; classify: to sort socks; to sort eggs by grade. |
| 8. | to separate or take from other sorts or from others (often fol. by out): to sort the good from the bad; to sort out the children's socks. |
| 9. | to assign to a particular class, group, or place (often fol. 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 key 1 (def. 19). |
| 12. | Archaic. to suit; agree; fit. |
| 13. | British Dialect. to associate, mingle, or be friendly. |
| 14. | sort out,
|
| 15. | of sorts,
|
| 16. | out of sorts,
|
| 17. | sort of, Informal. in a way; somewhat; rather: Their conversation was sort of tiresome. |

sort (sôrt) n.
[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin sors, sort-, lot; see ser-2 in Indo-European roots.] sort'a·ble adj., sort'er n. |
sort
1.
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.
Unix manual page: sort(1).
(1997-02-12)
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.