sheaf

plural sheaves · plural sheafs

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

   Ev’n while the Reaper fills his greedy hands, / And binds the golden Sheafs in brittle bands

   1697, Virgil, “The First Book of the Georgics”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC, page 60, lines 429–430

   3 more examples

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

   c. 1588–1593 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act V, scene iii], line 70

   And then in haste her bow'r she leaves, With Thestylis to bind the sheaves; Or if the earlier season lead To the tann'd haycock in the mead.

   1645, John Milton, L'Allegro

   'Tis not very long since there were Dwarfs at Jüne near Göttingen, who used to go into the fields and steal the sheaves of corn.

   1850, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, London: H.G. Bohn, page 222

   Synonyms: reap, wheatsheaf

2. Any collection of things bound together.

   a sheaf of paper

   3 more examples

   Bond reflected on the problem as he collected the sheaf of hundred thousand and then the sheaves of ten thousand franc notes.

   1953, Ian Fleming, “The Secret Agent”, in Casino Royale, London: Pan Books, published 1955, page 8

   Max found himself accepting an impressive sheaf of money, more than he had ever touched before, and the books were taken from him before he could think of another objection.

   1953, Robert A. Heinlein, Starman Jones, page 45

   Together the two men march up the aisle and mount the dais, and while Muspole shakes hands with the chairman and his lady, the major draws a sheaf of notes from a briefcase and lays them on the table.

   1986, John le Carré, A Perfect Spy

   Synonyms: bundle

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

   The sheaf of arrows shook, and rattled in the case.

   1700, John Dryden, Palamon and Arcite

4. collectiveA quantity of arrows, usually twenty-four.

   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.

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

5. engineeringA sheave.
6. An abstract construct in topology that associates data to the open sets of a topological space (i.e. a presheaf) in such a way so as to make the local and global data compatible, generalizing the situation of functions, fiber bundles, manifold structure, etc. on a topological space. Formally, a presheaf ℱ whose sections are, in a technical sense, uniquely determined by their restrictions onto smaller sets: that is, given an open cover U_i of U:
   1. mathematicsIf two sections over U agree under restriction to every U_i, then the sections are the same.
   2. mathematicsGiven a family of sections s_i∈ℱ(U_i) such that all pairs (s_i,s_j) agree under restriction to U_i∩U_j, there is a (unique) section s over U whose restriction to U_i is s_i.

present singular third person sheafs · participle present sheafing · participle past sheafed · past sheafed

1. transitiveTo gather and bind into a sheaf; to make into sheaves

   to sheaf wheat

2. intransitiveTo collect and bind cut grain, or the like; to make sheaves.

   They that reap must sheaf and bind; Then to cart with Rosalind.

   c. 1598–1600 (date written), William Shakespeare, “As You Like It”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene ii], line 107