👨‍🌾 A flour maker 🦋 A powdery moth 🛠️ A cutting machine

miller

9.0

A machine that cuts or shapes metal with rotating cutters

noun
/ˈmɪlər/

Specialized

: fresadora

In the workshop, the miller hummed as he fed the metal sheet into the rotating cutters.

Examples

Most millers—80 percent—purchased their machines on credit.

Academic text (2009)
The miller carefully adjusted the settings on the machine to ensure a precise cut of the metal.
A nutritious, inexpensive white flour from small white beans could be ready in about 10 minutes, using a grinder, miller, and twin-screw extruder.

Academic text (1994)
Robin looks from Ivy to Batman, grabs a strut on the miller's wheel, the giant cog lifting him up towards the catwalk and his partner.

Fiction book (1997)
Using a miller, workers shaped the steel components with accuracy for the new factory assembly.

Synonyms

machine tool

vsmiller

Specialized

4 3.9

A powered machine that cuts and shapes metal or other materials

is a specific tool that feeds a secured workpiece against rotating cutters

milling machine

vsmiller

Specialized

1 5.6

A tool with a spinning cutter that cuts and shapes metal and other hard materials

focuses on feeding a secured workpiece along a carriage against cutters

Compounds

dusty miller

6.7

A garden plant with soft silvery leaves used for decoration

Miller of Dee

Archaic

9.9

A person who is happy with a simple, cheerful life

moth miller

Specialized

9.7

A small moth with powdery wings that look like flour dust

Surface Forms

miller singular

millers plural

Morphology

miller = mill (semi-transparent) = mill + er

The suffixal structure is clear, but the specific machine-tool sense is technical and less predictable for an average learner.

Etymology

Miller for a machine comes from the same root mill, which means to 'grind' or 'shape'; the name moved to tools that 'mill' metal by cutting. So a miller is a machine that shapes or cuts material, much like a mill shapes grain.