Jean Froissart

This means that they are bound by law and custom to plough the fields of their masters, harvest the corn, gather it into barns, and thresh and winnow the grain; they must also mow and carry home the hay, cut and collect wood, and perform all manner of tasks of this kind.

French Historian

Om Malik

It is becoming harder for us to stay on top of the onslaught - e-mails, messages, appointments, alerts. Augmented intelligence offers the possibility of winnowing an increasing number of inputs and options in a way that humans can't manage without a helping hand.

Indian Writer

Warren Ellis

I was originally going to train as a journalist, passing a series of exams that winnowed ten thousand applicants down to one hundred places on a National Union of Journalists course.

British Author

Huston Smith

When the scientific method came into being, it gave us a new window on the truth; namely, a method by laboratory-controlled experiments to winnow true hypotheses from false ones.

American Theologian

Carl Sagan

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

American Scientist

Think of 'winnow' as sorting ideas like one would sort objects, keeping only the valuable ones.

Conceptual Filtering

Used metaphorically to describe reducing a group to its most essential parts.

Metaphorical Use

It often involves prioritizing the most important elements or information.

Prioritizing Essentials

Originally refers to a farming process, which gives it a traditional, somewhat rural connotation.

Agricultural Roots

Involves separating something of value (grain) from what's worthless (chaff).

Separating Good from Bad

Winnowing suggests a careful, deliberate process to ensure separation is thorough.

Careful Precision

 remote mountains in the amazon rainforest and all kinds of other stuff and the photographers sent back almost two million images and from these we selected several hundred to publish in the magazine and online and now out of those that were published whitney and sadie are winnowing down the final

Capturing the Year in an...

 and the the winnowing out the loss of great numbers of offspring in some instances happen was really right from the very beginning I mean barnacle geese in this says for

Life and Death with...

 those individuals who were not carriers of any genetic protection would have been more likely to die. This winnowing effect together with a strong cultural predilection