milieu
Americannoun
-
milieus,
plural
-
milieux
plural
noun
Synonym Usage
See environment.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of milieu
First recorded in 1795–1805; from French, equivalent to mi (from Latin medius “middle”; see medium) + lieu lieu
Explanation
A milieu is a surrounding culture. Your family, house, neighborhood, school, and people you hang out with make up your milieu. For example, if you live in a mansion and have rich friends, you’re part of the upper crust milieu. A milieu is both "surroundings" and everything that makes up the surroundings. Your milieu is your world, or the context you come from. Sometimes a milieu shapes a person, as when a "milieu of abuse and poverty," inspires someone to improve things for others. Milieu sounds a lot like mildew without the "d," but unless you grew up in a moldy bathtub, mildew probably has little to do with your milieu, or environment.
Vocabulary lists containing milieu
100 SAT Words Beginning with "M"
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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A Walk in the Woods
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Its title is taken from the name of a New York club of considerable legend, and Madonna uses the setting to reminisce about her wild days in this milieu.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 7, 2026
To those in Griffin’s milieu, or who aspire to be, the video was a distasteful and even dangerous broadside against the city’s wealthy.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 15, 2026
Like the milieu in which they’re set, prison movies can be terribly constricting.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 24, 2026
The portraits play off the novel’s milieu: a series of churches, as well as the medieval French castle that is home to an eccentric and mostly absent prince.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 22, 2026
Obviously, the environment or the milieu that surrounds an organism contributes to its physical attributes.
From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee
It speaks to how isolating online social milieus can be.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 9, 2026
Schumer, 74, and Jeffries, 55, hail from different Brooklyn milieus.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 27, 2025
Cavanna was a Y.A. novelist who wrote sensitive, intelligent coming-of-age stories about teenagers, often featuring well-researched milieus: a struggling Vermont inn, a Pennsylvania ranch, a fishing community.
From New York Times ● Jan. 20, 2024
But most television shows offer the conceit of characters inhabiting their own milieus.
From Salon ● Feb. 11, 2022
Oppenheimer recognized that their social milieus were fated to remain distinct.
From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik
Forests, for example, release a complex chemical milieux into the air.
From Science Daily ● May 15, 2024
These scientific milieux shaped their inquiries and practices, and enabled them to contest and advance knowledge.
From Nature ● Sep. 16, 2019
The remake runs twenty minutes longer than the original—twenty minutes that detail Priest’s audacious maneuverings and their grim effects in milieux left unexplored by the earlier film.
From The New Yorker ● Jun. 15, 2018
From the mucousy milieux of Alien's xenomorphs to the synthetic, sentient puddle of Terminator 2's T-1000, there was something especially slimy running straight through the 1980s.
From The Verge ● Aug. 23, 2017
Wonderful must it clearly have been still to fed amid laxities and vaguenesses such a difference of milieux and, as they used to say, of atmospheres.
From A Small Boy and Others by Henry James
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
