triages

Noun

triage (countable and uncountable, plural triages)

1. Assessment or sorting according to quality, need, etc., especially to determine how resources will be allocated.
   • Let us think of triage, and remember the word's origins. It began with French wool growers in the eighteenth century, but its most illuminating use comes from eighteenth century coffee bean growers, who sorted their beans into best, middling, and broken. The last category came to be known as...2004, Paul M. Levitt, Dark Matters: a Novel, →ISBN, page 40
2. The process of sorting patients so as to determine the order in which they will be treated (for example, by assigning precedence according to the urgency of illness or injury).
3. A facility within a hospital that screens walk-in patients and determines which department or clinic to send them to. (See also triage center.)
   • I knew where most of the medical supplies were kept. I went to triage. The room was chaos.2013 11, John Macdonald, Question Authority, Balboa Press, →ISBN, page 170
4. (broadly) The process of prioritizing bugs to be fixed.
5. That which is picked out, especially broken coffee beans.
6. (UK) A marshalling yard, classification yard.
   • Similarly, any group of sidings is known to army railway personnel as a "triage". This word is derived from the French verb trier, which means literally "to sort," and hence "triage" has become the common army expression for a marshalling yard.1943 September and October, “Military and Civil Railways”, in Railway Magazine, page 257

See all 7 meanings of triage