sheaf

noun

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

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

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

   “'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.”

2. Any collection of things bound together.

   “a sheaf of paper”

   “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.”

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

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

4. A 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.”

5. A 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:
7. 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:

verb

1. (transitive)To gather and bind into a sheaf; to make into sheaves

   “to sheaf wheat”

2. (intransitive)To collect and bind cut grain, or the like; to make sheaves.

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