Other forms: milestones
A milestone is a point on a long road you can look back at and say you reached it — a first word, a first year in business, the millionth customer. The office marked its tenth birthday with a cake and a photograph, and everybody there knew that was the milestone that counted.
It travels with three verbs: you reach a milestone, you pass one, you mark one, and the big ones get called major milestones. In a project plan the milestones are the dated points between the start and the finish, and a manager will ask whether you have hit them. Keep the word for progress along something long — a career, a recovery, a build, a life. A pleasant afternoon is not a milestone. The day the last box was unpacked is one.
1nounlandmarkA point marking real progress along a long path.~88%
“Her first solo flight was a milestone.”
synonyms: landmark, turning point
2nounmilestoneA dated point of progress in a plan or a project.~3%
“We missed the second milestone by three weeks.”
3nounstoneA stone set beside a road showing the distance to the next place.~9%
“The old milestones still give the miles to London.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 139 sentences found in the wild and placed 98 of them on a sense (41 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
It is exactly what it says: a mile and a stone. Mile carries its own arithmetic — Latin mīlle passūs, a thousand paces — so a milestone is the stone standing at the end of a thousand paces, and every one you walk past is another thousand behind you.
From mile + stone. Compare Dutch mijlsteen (“milestone”), German Low German Mielensteen (“milestone”), German Meilenstein (“milestone”), Swedish milsten (“milestone”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA