Word.ws English Dictionary

through the mill

through the mill adjective: through a period of bad treatment or an ordeal.

Adjective

through the mill (not comparable)

  1. (idiomatic) Through a period of bad treatment or an ordeal.
    • My father found me a nuisance, and put me through the mill, and I can never forget it particularly the evenings.1907, E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey, Part II, XVIii [Uniform ed., p. 192]
    • ‘He’s been through the mill, this one,’ she said.1999, J. K. Rowling, chapter 4, in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Bloomsbury

Questions about through the mill

What does through the mill mean?
Through the mill means through a period of bad treatment or an ordeal.
What part of speech is through the mill?
Through the mill is an adjective.

Words near through the mill in the dictionary

  1. through the floor
  2. through the gate
  3. through the hawsehole
  4. through the looking glass
  5. through the looking-glass
  6. through the mill
  7. through the roof
  8. through the sunroof
  9. through the wazoo
  10. through the wrong end of the telescope
  11. through thick and thin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-through the mill.ogg.

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