Word.ws English Dictionary

born in a mill

born in a mill phrase: applied to a person who speaks more loudly than necessary.

Phrase

born in a mill

  1. Applied to a person who speaks more loudly than necessary.
    • Were you born in a mill, curtole? you prate so hye.1578, George Whetstone, Promos and Cassandra, quoted in 1965, Burton Egbert Stevenson, The Macmillan Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Famous Phrases (page 497)
    • Hence among the vulgar, when you speak to them with too loud a voice, they tell you "that they were not born in a mill."1981, Benjamin Rush, Eric T. Carlson, Jeffrey L. Wollock, Benjamin Rush's Lectures on the Mind, page 345

Origin of born in a mill

The loud machinery in a mill may necessitate raising one's voice to be heard.

Questions about born in a mill

What does born in a mill mean?
Born in a mill means applied to a person who speaks more loudly than necessary.
What part of speech is born in a mill?
Born in a mill is a phrase.

Words near born in a mill in the dictionary

  1. born again
  2. born and bred
  3. born at night but not last night
  4. born digital
  5. born in a barn
  6. born in a mill
  7. born in mind
  8. born in the purple
  9. born in the vestry
  10. born loser
  11. born losers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: born in a mill (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “born in a mill.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/born_in_a_mill. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.