Word.ws English Dictionary

pecker mill

pecker mill noun: a kind of rice mill.

Noun

pecker mill (plural pecker mills)

  1. (US, dialectal, historical) A kind of rice mill.
    • Rice mills, called pecker, cog, and water mills... The first... so called, from the pestle's striking... in the manner of a wood pecker.1802, J. Drayton, A view of South Carolina, as respects her natural and civil concerns, section 121
    • The rice was then cut with the sickle and carried in on the head, then threshed with the flail, then milled and dressed, in some cases wholly by human labor, and in others by a rude machine, called a pecker mill.1851, James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow, Robert Gibbes Barnwell, Edwin Bell, De Bow's New Orleans Monthly Review, volume 11, page 307

Examples of pecker mill in a sentence

  • the capacity of such a pecker mill was increased simply by mounting several in a row to be driven by a common shaft.1991, Jeon Lee, The Historical Geography of Rice Culture in the American South:
  • By the 1780s two types of mills were used that utilized animal power, those being the pecker mill and the cog mill.1995, C. Wayne Smith, Crop Production: Evolution, History, and Technology, page 241:
  • The pecker mill is likely the fulcrum device developed by Guerrard in 1691.2003, Michael Trinkley, Debi Hacker, Sarah Fick, Liberty Hall: A Small Eighteenth Century Rice Plantation, page 30:

Forms of pecker mill

pluralpecker mills

Origin of pecker mill

pecker (“a mechanical device moving in a pecking fashion”) + mill

Questions about pecker mill

What does pecker mill mean?
Pecker mill means a kind of rice mill.
How do you use pecker mill in a sentence?
the capacity of such a pecker mill was increased simply by mounting several in a row to be driven by a common shaft.
What part of speech is pecker mill?
Pecker mill is a noun.
What is the plural of pecker mill?
The plural of pecker mill is pecker mills.

Words near pecker mill in the dictionary

  1. pecker
  2. pecker checker
  3. pecker checkers
  4. pecker head
  5. pecker heads
  6. pecker mill
  7. pecker mills
  8. pecker snot
  9. peckerhead
  10. peckerheads
  11. peckerless

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pecker 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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