sorting

Pluralsortings (some meanings)

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The act of arranging items into a sequence or set order.

   The sorting of the deck arranged every card by rank.

   Alphabetical sorting made the long index easy to navigate.

   Similarordering, arrangement, sequencing

   Oppositeshuffling

   Note

   Here the result is a sequence, not a set of piles. A sorting by rank, date or alphabet gives every item a place relative to the others. That is what separates it from the grouping sense, where items only need to land in the right bin. The noun can be counted: two sortings of the same list can produce different orders.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of separating items into groups according to type or category.

   The sorting of the recyclables divides glass, plastic, and paper into separate bins.

   Postal sorting groups letters by destination region.

   Similarseparation, classification, grouping, categorization

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of sort.

   The volunteers are sorting donated clothes by size.

   Sorting the recycling from the trash is part of her morning routine.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs. After a form of be it is the participle of a continuous tense (they are sorting the mail). At the head of a phrase it is the gerund and acts as a noun (sorting the mail takes an hour). The verb is mostly transitive, but it also has an intransitive use, to sort with others of the same kind, meaning to associate or agree. Its senses of choosing, culling and conforming are now obsolete.

4. 4
   nounUKcountable or uncountable

   The act of repairing something or putting it back into working order.

   The sorting of the leaky roof was long overdue.

   The car needed a proper sorting before the long drive north.

   Similarrepair, fixing, mending, overhaul, service

   Note

   A British use, and easy to misread elsewhere: a car that needs a proper sorting needs fixing, not organizing. It applies to anything put back in working order, such as a roof, an engine or a leak. Outside the UK, readers may take it for the grouping sense. For an audience that is not British, repair or fixing says the same thing without the ambiguity.

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