Milling

How to spell milling

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce milling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does milling mean?

1. verbMoving around in a disorganised mass, as a crowd does without clear direction.
2. nounThe process of grinding grain or other material into flour or powder.
3. nounThe machining of metal or other solid material by cutting it with a rotating tool.

Milling in a sentence

• verb

  Hundreds of commuters were milling around the station concourse.

• noun

  The village relied on the old watermill for the milling of its wheat.

• noun

  The workshop offers precision milling of aluminium parts.

• verb

  Tourists kept milling about the square while they waited for the parade.

• noun

  Stone milling produces a coarser, more nutritious flour.

• noun

  Computer-controlled milling ensures every component matches the design exactly.

Where does milling come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word grows from the noun 'mill', which English inherited from the Old English 'mylen', itself borrowed early from the Late Latin 'molina' and ultimately the Latin 'mola', meaning a millstone or grinding apparatus, related to 'molere', 'to grind'. The original sense was strictly about reducing grain to flour between heavy turning stones, which is why a mill was for centuries a building powered by water or wind. As the noun gathered new uses, 'milling' came to cover any mechanical grinding or cutting of material, including the precision shaping of metal on a milling machine and the production of the fine ridges around the edge of a coin. By the nineteenth century it had also acquired a vivid figurative sense: people 'milling' in a crowd were imagined to be churning and circling like grain caught between stones. The doubled 'l' simply reflects the short vowel in 'mill' before the suffix, the same pattern seen in 'filling' and 'drilling'.

How the word is built

• mill (from Latin mola, a grindstone)
• -ing (verbal/gerund suffix)