- A building equipped with machinery for grinding grain into flour or meal.
- A device or mechanism that grinds grain.
- A machine or device that reduces a solid or coarse substance into pulp or minute grains by crushing, grinding, or pressing: a pepper mill.
- A machine that releases the juice of fruits and vegetables by pressing or grinding: a cider mill.
- A machine, such as one for stamping coins, that produces something by the repetition of a simple process.
- A steel roller bearing a raised design, used for making a die or a printing plate by pressure.
- Any of various machines for shaping, cutting, polishing, or dressing metal surfaces.
- A building or group of buildings equipped with machinery for processing raw materials into finished or industrial products: a textile mill; a steel mill.
- A building or collection of buildings that has machinery for manufacture; a factory.
- A process, agency, or institution that operates in a routine way or turns out products in the manner of a factory: The college was nothing more than a diploma mill.
- A slow or laborious process: It took three years to get the bill through the legislative mill.
v., milled, mill·ing, mills. v.tr.
- To grind, pulverize, or break down into smaller particles in a mill.
- To transform or process mechanically in a mill.
- To shape, polish, dress, or finish in a mill or with a milling tool.
- To produce a ridge around the edge of (a coin).
- To groove or flute the rim of (a coin or other metal object).
- To agitate or stir until foamy.
- Western U.S. To cause (cattle) to move in a circle or tightening spiral in order to stop a stampede.
- To move around in churning confusion: “A crowd of school children milled about on the curb looking scared” (Anne Tyler).
- Slang. To fight with the fists; box.
- To undergo milling.
[Middle English milne, mille, from Old English mylen, from Late Latin molīna, molīnum, from feminine and neuter of molīnus, of a mill, from Latin mola, millstone, from molere, to grind.]
REGIONAL NOTE To mill, in Western U.S. English, means “to run cattle in a circle, sometimes deliberately in order to halt a stampede.” In the Oxford English Dictionary we find this 19th-century example of the verb: “At last the cattle ran with less energy, and it was presently easy to ‘mill’ them into a circle and to turn them where it seemed most desirable” (Munsey's Magazine). This usage of mill comes from the resemblance of the cattle's circular motion to the action of millstones. A related intransitive sense of the verb is better known in Standard English, as shown in the Oxford English Dictionary citation of an 1888 quotation from Theodore Roosevelt: “The cattle may begin to run, and then get ‘milling’–that is, all crowd together into a mass like a ball, wherein they move round and round.” Originally this sense of mill also meant “circular motion”; now it means “to move around in churning confusion” with no pattern in particular.
mill2 (mĭl)
n. (Abbr. M. or mi.)
A monetary unit equal to 1/1000 of a U.S. dollar or 1/10 of a cent.
[Short for Latin mīllēsimus, thousandth. See mil1.]
