Other forms: mills, milling, milled
A mill grinds things down: grain into flour, beans into coffee, peppercorns into what lands on your plate. The stone building by the river with a wheel turning in the water is a mill, and so is the little wooden grinder on the table.
As a verb, to mill grain is to grind it, and flour is milled; metal and timber are milled too, meaning cut and shaped by machine. The word then grew to cover whole factories: a cotton mill, a steel mill, a paper mill, the tall chimneys of a mill town. People mill about or mill around as well, moving in a crowd with nowhere to go, like passengers milling around a departure board. Run-of-the-mill means ordinary, whatever came off the line without being picked out. And to be put through the mill is to be tested hard and come out worn.
1nounwatermillA building where grain is ground into flour.
“The old mill by the river is a hotel now.”
2nounsmallA machine or small hand device for grinding something.
“He passed the pepper mill down the table.”
3nounlargeA large factory, especially one working cotton, steel, paper or timber.
“Half the town once worked at the cotton mill.”
4verbmillTo grind grain into flour, or to cut and shape metal or wood by machine.
“The wheat is milled a few miles from the field it grew in.”
5verbmoveTo move about in a crowd with no clear direction.
“Passengers milled around the departure board waiting for news.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
mill is a building or machine for grinding.
Mill is Old English mylen, from Latin molina, and behind that molo, to grind, on the Proto-Indo-European root *melh2-. The same root grinds away inside millstone. The building, the machine, the factory and the restless crowd all trace back to one action: something hard being crushed between two surfaces.
Proto-Indo-European
*melh₂-
Latin
molīna
Proto-West Germanic
*mulīnu — mill
Old English
mylen
Middle English
mylne
English, today
mill
Built from
From Middle English mylne, mille, from Old English mylen, from Proto-West Germanic mulīnu (“mill”), from Latin molīna, molīnum, molīnus (“mill”), from Latin molō (“grind, mill”), closely allied to Proto-Germanic muljaną (“to crush, grind”) (see English millstone). Perhaps cognate with Milne. a doublet of moline and moulin and blin.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA