Sort Meaning
/soɹt/Definition, CEFR level A1, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
Listen pronunciation
Definition
nounA general type.
nounManner, way; form of being or acting.
Sentence Examples
That sort of thing can happen when you are in haste.
It took quite a while to sort out all our luggage.
Please sort these files into alphabetical order before leaving.
CEFR Practice Quiz
She needed to ____ all the papers by date before filing them.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
Can you please ____ these files into alphabetical order to make them easier to find later?
Word Origin & History
From Middle English sort, soort, sorte (cognate Dutch soort, German Sorte, Danish sort, Swedish sort), borrowed from Old French sorte (“class, kind”), from Latin sortem, accusative form of sors (“lot, fate, share, rank, category”).
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"I stumbled along through the young pines and huckleberry bushes. Pretty soon I struck into a sort of path that, I cal'lated, might lead to the road I was hunting for. It twisted and turned, and, the first thing I knew, made a sudden bend around a bunch of bayberry scrub and opened out into a big clear space like a lawn."
— 1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter I, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC:
"“[…] the awfully hearty sort of Christmas cards that people do send to other people that they don't know at all well. You know. The kind that have mottoes like
Here's rattling good luck and roaring good cheer, / With lashings of food and great hogsheads of beer.[…]”"
— 1921, Ben Travers, chapter 1, in A Cuckoo in the Nest, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 1925, →OCLC:
"The face which emerged was not reassuring.[…]. He was not a mongol but there was a deficiency of a sort there, and it was not made more pretty by a latter-day hair cut which involved eccentrically long elf-locks and oiled black curls."
— 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 17, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC:
"Swearing doesn't just mean what we now understand by "dirty words". It is entwined, in social and linguistic history, with the other sort of swearing: vows and oaths."
— 2013 June 14, Sam Leith, “Where the profound meets the profane”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 189, number 1, page 37:
"Soon as the term of those six years shall cease,
Ye then shall hither back return again,
The marriage to accomplish vow’d betwixt you twain.
Which for my part, I covet to perform,
In sort as through the world I did proclaim,
That whoso kill’d that monster (most deform)
And him in hardy battle overcame,
Should have mine only daughter to his Dame […]"
— 1590, Edmund Spenser, “(please specify the book)”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:
Explore More A1 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
She needed to ____ all the papers by date before filing them.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
Can you please ____ these files into alphabetical order to make them easier to find later?