Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tremon 912 days ago
So what does a textile mill do? Does it grind cloth into fine dust, or does it something else? Is the sawdust produced by a sawmill its primary output product?

The word mill is overloaded. In Dutch, these are two separate words: molen, a singular noun describing a machine using a rotational mechanism for powering some industrial process; and malen, a verb describing the milling of particles into flour. In this case, the article describes a mill of the first kind.

2 comments

If the brits and not the yanks had taken the lead in production hw, we would still be saying "mill" instead of "ALU".
One suspects there's a certain amount of grinding in Fickmühlen.