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Glite Dictionary
milline

milline

9.9
A fee for one small advertising line printed in a million newspapers or magazines
  • noun
  • Archaic
: milina
  • The price of the newspaper advertisement was calculated in millines to determine its total cost.

Examples

  • Historic rate cards often quoted charges in terms of millines for large-scale print campaigns.

  • The milline is a standard measurement in print advertising.

  • Because the ad ran in a million copies, its rate was set at one milline per agate line.

  • I need to calculate how many millines we can afford for this campaign.

  • The ad ran in a million copies, and its rate was set at one milline per agate line.

  • Advertisers often use milline rates to estimate costs in national print campaigns.

  • Each advertisement in the magazine was priced based on a standard of millines for clarity.

Surface Forms

milline singular
millines plural

Morphology

milline = million + line (semi-transparent) = milli + line

The form likely fuses 'million' and 'line' (i.e., 'line per million'), so a learner who knows 'million' and 'line' can roughly infer 'a line in a million copies', but the precise technical sense ('agate line' in advertising) requires domain knowledge.

Etymology

Milline is related to million and the prefix milli-, like in millimeter, which come from an old word for 'thousand'. So a milline is a very small ad unit used to price one line when it appears in one million copies, and the name helps you remember the 'million' scale.