Stanley WalkerTime
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Winnow Has Old English Roots
As one Bob Dylan song goes, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” In fact, all you need to do is hold up a dandelion puff the next time there’s a breeze blowing, and watch the wind winnow the silver-white seeds from the rest of the head. Winnow and wind are both ancient words in English, and both share an ancestor with the Latin word for wind, ventus. Winnow first applied to the removal of chaff (seed coverings and other unwanted debris) from grain using the wind or other air current. This use was soon extended to describe the removal of anything undesirable or unwanted (a current example of this sense would be “winnowing out sensitive material”). People then began using the word for the selection of the most desirable elements (as in “winnowing down the list to the most qualified applicants”). Although these senses are more familiar today to most English users than the one used in processing grain, if you have trouble remembering any of them, just remember that the answer, friend, is blowing in the wind.
Examples of winnow in a Sentence
Patrick Aguilar, The Conversation, 17 Oct. 2025
There's something so deeply satisfying about winnowing a huge capital ship down to its smallest components, finding critical welds and junctures, and melting them apart with your heat laser.
—Alan Bradley, Space.com, 7 Oct. 2025
These associates would then be winnowed out over time.
—Atta Tarki, Harvard Business Review, 2 Oct. 2025
West Point cancelled an award ceremony for Tom Hanks, after having already winnowed its library of potentially offensive books.
—Louis Menand, New Yorker, 26 Sep. 2025
See All Example Sentences for winnow
Cite this Entry
“Winnow.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/winnow. Accessed 5 Nov. 2025.
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