Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of various annual grasses with small grains that are harvested for food, livestock feed, and birdseed, especially proso millet.
  • noun The grains of any of these plants.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A people; a nation.
  • noun The green foxtail, Chætochloa viridis.
  • noun Same as Indian millet .
  • noun A cereal grass, Panicum miliaceum, known from antiquity, and still cultivated in the East and in southern and central Europe.
  • noun One of several other grasses: generally with a prefixed descriptive. See below

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Bot.) The name of several cereal and forage grasses which bear an abundance of small roundish grains. The common millets of Germany and Southern Europe are Panicum miliaceum, and Setaria Italica.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Any of a group of various types of grass or its grains used as food.
  • noun historical A semi-autonomous confessional community under the Ottoman Empire, especially a non-Muslim one.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun any of various small-grained annual cereal and forage grasses of the genera Panicum, Echinochloa, Setaria, Sorghum, and Eleusine
  • noun small seed of any of various annual cereal grasses especially Setaria italica
  • noun French painter of rural scenes (1814-1875)

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English milet, from Old French, diminutive of mil, millet, from Latin milium; see melə- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French millet; ultimately from Latin milium.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Turkish millet, from Ottoman Turkish ملت (millet), from Arabic ملة (milla(t)).

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word millet.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.