In general contexts, winnowing is about removing what is not wanted. One can winnow items, or one can winnow something that has items: you winnow less important or less desirable items by removing them from a group, list, etc.; and you winnow a list or group by removing the less important or less desirable items from it. In agricultural contexts, to winnow chaff (unwanted seed coverings and other debris) is to remove it from grain by throwing the grain up in the air and letting the wind blow the unwanted parts away.

// The search committee is finding it extremely difficult to winnow the list of job candidates down to three finalists; many of them are highly qualified.

// We'll need to winnow down our options.

// Harvesters winnowed the chaff from the wheat.

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“Tasked with winnowing the field down to 17 semifinalists, the judges filled out score sheets for each part of the competition.” — Madison Malone Kircher and Bridget Bennett, The New York Times, 30 Jan. 2024

As one Bob Dylan song goes, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” In fact, all you need to do is hold up a dandelion puff the next time there’s a breeze blowing, and watch the wind winnow the silver-white seeds from the rest of the head. Winnow and wind are both ancient words in English, and both share an ancestor with the Latin word for wind, ventus. Winnow first applied to the removal of chaff (seed coverings and other unwanted debris) from grain using the wind or other air current. This use was soon extended to describe the removal of anything undesirable or unwanted (a current example of this sense would be “winnowing out sensitive material”). People then began using the word for the selection of the most desirable elements (as in “winnowing down the list to the most qualified applicants”). Although these senses are more familiar today to most English users than the one used in processing grain, if you have trouble remembering any of them, just remember that the answer, friend, is blowing in the wind.