Noun

(en-noun)

A quantity of the stalks and ears of wheat, rye, or other grain, bound together; a bundle of grain or straw.

* 1593 , (William Shakespeare), Titus Andronicus , Act V, Scene III, line 70:

O, let me teach you how to knit again / This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf , / These broken limbs again into one body.

* (rfdate) (John Dryden):

The reaper fills his greedy hands, / And binds the golden sheaves in brittle bands.

Any collection of things bound together; a bundle.

a sheaf of paper

A bundle of arrows sufficient to fill a quiver, or the allowance of each archer.

* (rfdate) (John Dryden):

The sheaf of arrows shook and rattled in the case.

A quantity of arrows, usually twenty-four.

* 1786 , Francis Grose, A Treatise on Ancient Armour and Weapons , page 34:

Arrows were anciently made of reeds, afterwards of cornel wood, and occasionally of every species of wood: but according to Roger Ascham, ash was best; arrows were reckoned by sheaves', a ' sheaf consisted of twenty-four arrows.

(mechanical) A sheave.

(mathematics) An abstract construct in topology that associates data to the open sets of a topological space, together with well-defined restrictions from larger to smaller open sets, subject to the condition that compatible data on overlapping open sets corresponds, via the restrictions, to a unique datum on the union of the open sets.

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Noun

(en noun)

A number of things or persons being in some relation to one another.

* , chapter=5

, title= The Mirror and the Lamp , passage=Then everybody once more knelt, and soon the blessing was pronounced. The choir and the clergy trooped out slowly, […], down the nave to the western door. […] At a seemingly immense distance the surpliced group stopped to say the last prayer.}}

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-07-19, author=(Peter Wilby)

, volume=189, issue=6, page=30, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Finland spreads word on schools , passage=Imagine a country where children do nothing but play until they start compulsory schooling at age seven. Then, without exception, they attend comprehensives until the age of 16. Charging school fees is illegal, and so is sorting pupils into ability groups by streaming or setting.}}

(group theory) A set with an associative binary operation, under which there exists an identity element, and such that each element has an inverse.

(geometry, archaic) An effective divisor on a curve.

A (usually small) group of people who perform music together.

(astronomy) A small number (up to about fifty) of galaxies that are near each other.

(chemistry) A column in the periodic table of chemical elements.

(chemistry) A functional entity consisting of certain atoms whose presence provides a certain property to a molecule, such as the methyl group.

(sociology) A subset of a culture or of a society.

(military) An air force formation.

(geology) A collection of formations or rock strata.

(computing) A number of users with same rights with respect to accession, modification, and execution of files, computers and peripherals.

An element of an espresso machine from which hot water pours into the portafilter.

(music) A number of eighth, sixteenth, etc., notes joined at the stems; sometimes rather indefinitely applied to any ornament made up of a few short notes.

(sports) A set of teams playing each other in the same division, while at the same time not playing teams that belong to other sets in the division.

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