sheaf

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun A bundle of cut stalks of grain or similar plants bound with straw or twine.
• noun A collection of items held or bound together.
• noun An archer's quiver.
• transitive verb To gather and bind into a bundle.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun A bundle or collection.
• noun Specifically
• noun A quantity of the stalks of wheat, rye, oats, or barley bound together; a bundle of stalks or straw.
• noun A bundle of twenty-four arrows, the number furnished to an archer and carried by him at one time.
• noun A bundle of steel containing thirty gads or ingots.
• noun In geometry, a doubly infinite manifold of curves or surfaces comprising all which fulfil certain general conditions and also pass through certain fixed points; especially, a manifold of points or planes passing through one fixed point.
• noun Synonyms sheaf, Shock, Stack, Rick. A sheaf is about an armful of the stalks of any small grain, tied at the middle into a bundle; a shock is a pile of sheaves, generally from ten to twelve, standing upright or leaning together, sometimes with two or three laid across the top to turn off rain; a stack or rick is a much larger pile, constructed carefully to stand for some time, and thatched or covered, or so built as to keep out rain. In the United States the word stack is much more common than rick.
• To collect and bind; make sheaves of.
• To make sheaves.
• noun Same as sheave.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun (Mech.), rare A sheave.
• transitive verb To gather and bind into a sheaf; to make into sheaves.
• noun A quantity of the stalks and ears of wheat, rye, or other grain, bound together; a bundle of grain or straw.
• noun Any collection of things bound together; a bundle; specifically, a bundle of arrows sufficient to fill a quiver, or the allowance of each archer, -- usually twenty-four.
• intransitive verb To collect and bind cut grain, or the like; to make sheaves.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun A quantity of the stalks and ears of wheat, rye, or other grain, bound together; a bundle of grain or straw.
• noun Any collection of things bound together; a bundle.
• noun A bundle of arrows sufficient to fill a quiver, or the allowance of each archer.
• noun A quantity of arrows, usually twenty-four.
• noun mechanical A sheave.
• noun mathematics An abstract construct in topology that associates data to the open sets of a topological space, together with well-defined restrictions from larger to smaller open sets, subject to the condition that compatible data on overlapping open sets corresponds, via the restrictions, to a unique datum on the union of the open sets.
• verb transitive To gather and bind into a sheaf; to make into sheaves; as, to sheaf wheat.
• verb intransitive To collect and bind cut grain, or the like; to make sheaves.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun a package of several things tied together for carrying or storing