triage
noun /ˈtriːɑːʒ/
/ˈtriːɑːʒ/
[uncountable]- (in a hospital) the process of deciding how seriously ill or injured a person is, so that the most serious cases can be treated firstTopics Medicinec2Oxford Collocations DictionaryTriage is used before these nouns:
- nurse
Word Originearly 18th cent. (in the sense ‘the action of sorting items according to quality’): from French, from trier ‘separate out’. The current sense dates from the 1930s, from the military system of assessing the wounded on the battlefield.