ahechar

An old agricultural term meaning to sift or winnow grain — separating wheat, corn, or other grain from chaff and impurities using a sieve. Nearly obsolete in modern speech, replaced by cribar or aventar in most contexts, and now mostly found in texts about traditional farming.

• Los campesinos ahechaban el trigo antes de molerlo. — The farmers winnowed the wheat before milling it.
• Ahechar el grano a mano era una labor lenta. — Winnowing grain by hand was slow work.
• El texto describe cómo se ahechaba la cebada en el pueblo. — The text describes how barley was winnowed in the village.

Confusing ahechar with hechar, a common misspelling of echar — they're unrelated; ahechar is its own rare verb about sifting grain, not a variant of echar.