Triage
Etymology
From French “trier” (to sort or sift), used first for grading coffee beans and wool by quality. It entered medicine through military surgery in the Napoleonic era, when battlefield doctors had to sort the wounded by who could be saved and who could wait. The word carries its commercial origin honestly: it is, at heart, sorting under constraint.
noun · /TREE-ahzh/
The practice of sorting patients by urgency so that limited care reaches those who need it most, first.
What it names
The hard logic of scarce help under pressure — deciding not who deserves care but who cannot wait — a discipline that has spread far beyond the emergency room.
Example
At the crowded clinic, triage meant the man with chest pain was seen at once while the sprained ankle waited two hours.
Related idea
Triage is sorting by urgency; a prognosis is the forecast for one patient’s likely course. Triage borrows from prognosis — you cannot rank urgency without predicting outcomes — but its aim is allocation across many, not a single verdict.