Filter

/ˈfɪltə/ · noun

Meaning

A device which separates a suspended, dissolved, or particulate matter from a fluid, solution, or other substance; any device that separates one substance from another..

Definitions by Sense

1. A device which separates a suspended, dissolved, or particulate matter from a fluid, solution, or other substance; any device that separates one substance from another.
2. Electronics or software that separates unwanted signals (for example noise) from wanted signals or that attenuates selected frequencies.
3. Any item, mechanism, device, or procedure that acts to separate or isolate.
4. (figurative) Self-restraint in speech.
5. (mathematics, order theory) A non-empty upper set (of a partially ordered set) which is closed under binary infima (a.k.a. meets).
6. (photography) A translucent object placed in the light path of a camera to remove certain wavelengths (colors), or a computer program that simulates such an effect.
7. (social media) An appearance-altering digital image effect.
8. (transitive) To sort, sift, or isolate.

Example Sentences

Then add four drops of crocodile semen, and pass the mixture through a filter.

He runs an email filter to catch the junk mail.

In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result. If the bumf arrived electronically, the take-up rate was 0.1%. And for online adverts the “conversion” into sales was a minuscule 0.01%. That means about $165 billion was spent not on drumming up business, but on annoying people, creating landfill and cluttering spam filters.

He's got no filter, and he's always offending people as a result.

These were women with enormous feelings and, almost always, no filter to mediate their expression of them.

The collection of cofinite subsets of ℝ is a filter under inclusion: it includes the intersection of every pair of its members, and includes every superset of every cofinite set.

If (1) the universal set (here, the set of natural numbers) were called a "large" set, (2) the superset of any "large" set were also a "large" set, and (3) the intersection of a pair of "large" sets were also a "large" set, then the set of all "large" sets would form a filter.

He don't need no filter posting pictures!

Synonyms for filter

Antonyms for filter

Related Words

Word Forms

• filters
• filtering
• filtered

Usage Notes

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