Word.ws English Dictionary

going through the mill

going through the mill is the present participle and gerund of go through the mill.

Meaning of go through the mill

Verb

go through the mill (third-person singular simple present goes through the mill, present participle going through the mill, simple past went through the mill, past participle gone through the mill)

  1. (idiomatic) To experience the suffering or discipline necessary to bring one to a certain degree of knowledge or skill, or to a certain mental state.
  2. (UK, obsolete, slang) To go through bankruptcy.
    • All know the high estimation debtors held the Act 1861, by the number who went "through the mill" at the close of 1869.1877, The Accountant, volume 3, page 3

Questions about going through the mill

What is going through the mill the present participle and gerund of?
Going through the mill is the present participle and gerund of go through the mill.

Words near going through the mill in the dictionary

  1. going through fire and water
  2. going through hell
  3. going through hoops
  4. going through the attitudes
  5. going through the gears
  6. going through the mill
  7. going through the motions
  8. going through the trouble
  9. going through with
  10. going to bat
  11. going to bed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: going through the mill (page history and authors); go through the 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.

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Cite this entry: “going through the mill.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/going_through_the_mill. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.