dirt sifter
- noun
- US
:
tamiz de tierra
- After filling the raised bed, she used a dirt sifter to remove small stones and debris.
Examples
-
The dirt sifter made it easy to prepare fine soil for planting seeds.
-
Gardeners often rely on a dirt sifter to ensure that their soil is free of unwanted materials.
-
I bought a new dirt sifter yesterday.
-
Have you seen my dirt sifter?
-
After filling the raised bed, she used a dirt sifter to remove small stones and debris.
-
Gardeners often rely on a dirt sifter to ensure that their soil is free of unwanted materials.
-
The dirt sifter made it easy to prepare fine soil for planting seeds.
Synonyms
7
9.9
A coarse sieve used to separate stones from sand
A tool that removes stones and clumps from fine soil
How Fine
Surface Forms
Morphology
dirt + sifter
The noun is a straightforward compound of 'dirt' + 'sifter' where 'sifter' is transparently an agentive noun (device) from 'sift', so a B1 learner who knows the constituents can infer it is a tool for sifting soil to remove debris. The noun–noun compounding pattern and the literal relation between parts are cross-linguistically common, making the meaning directly predictable from the words.
Etymology
Dirt sifter comes from the simple image of shaking garden soil through a screen so the fine dirt falls through while stones and big bits stay on the sifter. That's why a dirt sifter is a tool used to 'remove stones and debris' and make fine soil for planting.