| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| mill1 |
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| PRONUNCIATION: |  m l |
| NOUN: | 1a. A building equipped with machinery for grinding grain into flour or meal. b. A device or mechanism that grinds grain. 2. A machine or device that reduces a solid or coarse substance into pulp or minute grains by crushing, grinding, or pressing: a pepper mill. 3. A machine that releases the juice of fruits and vegetables by pressing or grinding: a cider mill. 4a. A machine, such as one for stamping coins, that produces something by the repetition of a simple process. b. A steel roller bearing a raised design, used for making a die or a printing plate by pressure. c. Any of various machines for shaping, cutting, polishing, or dressing metal surfaces. 5a. A building or group of buildings equipped with machinery for processing raw materials into finished or industrial products: a textile mill; a steel mill. b. A building or collection of buildings that has machinery for manufacture; a factory. 6. 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. 7. A slow or laborious process: It took three years to get the bill through the legislative mill. | | VERB: | Inflected forms: milled, mill·ing, mills
| | TRANSITIVE VERB: | 1. To grind, pulverize, or break down into smaller particles in a mill. 2. To transform or process mechanically in a mill. 3. To shape, polish, dress, or finish in a mill or with a milling tool. 4a. To produce a ridge around the edge of (a coin). b. To groove or flute the rim of (a coin or other metal object). 5. To agitate or stir until foamy. 6. Western U.S. To cause (cattle) to move in a circle or tightening spiral in order to stop a stampede. | | INTRANSITIVE VERB: | 1. To move around in churning confusion: “A crowd of school children milled about on the curb looking scared” (Anne Tyler). 2. Slang To fight with the fists; box. 3. To undergo milling. | | ETYMOLOGY: | Middle English milne, mille, from Old English mylen, from Late Latin mol na, molnum, from feminine and neuter of molnus, of a mill, from Latin mola, millstone, from molere, to grind. See mel - in Appendix I. | | 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.
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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