whittling, weeding, sifting, vetting, nominating, paring, narrowing, laborious, selecting, trimming, finalists, process, sieving, judging, purging, culling, assembling, trickle, divvying, tabulating, handful, slicing, sorting, alphabetizing, streamlining, thins, plucking, combing, contenders, crafting, shuffling, crapshoot, chaff, disentangling, tedious, sizing, pickings, candidates, populating, hopefuls, selection, eliminating, painstaking, muddling, alternates, interviewing, entries, nonviable, overachievers, gustiest, unwieldy, methodically, parceling, shucking, splintered, truncating, toilsome, winding, churning, eyeballing, coaxing, bogging, tweaking, reordering, compiling, jettisoning, ploddingly, shortlist, cutting, enumerate, parsing, distilling, jockeying, counting, random sampling, stacking, rans, hilling, nominees, ferreting, remaking, submissions, slogging, shepherding, darwinian, rewriting, collating, contestants, herding, gleaners, successional, figuring, slimmed, dozens, plowing, alphabetically, boolean logic, downsizing, wannabes, lopping, choosing, snipping, scouring, hammering, purification, rebuilding, attrition, breaking, brushing, rubbing, shaking, undermining, chopping, dismantling, grinding, interrogation, pinching, recasting, cleaning, killing, cooling, hatching, leveling, turning, ventilating, blasting, cleansing, drying, fanning, purifying, rolling, stopping, baking, balancing, boring

., winnow

separation