ball mill

American

noun

a grinding mill in which the material to be ground is tumbled in a drum with heavy balls of iron, steel, or stone.

ball mill British

noun

engineering a horizontal cylinder or cone in which a substance, such as a mineral, is ground by rotation with steel or ceramic balls

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Etymology

Origin of ball mill

First recorded in 1900–05

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:

ball mill

Inside a sealed steel container called a ball mill, small pieces of sodium metal are ground together with Teflon.

From Science Daily ● Nov. 27, 2025

The team used a ball mill, a tool normally used to grind or blend materials in mineral processing, to grind down crystallized ice.

From Scientific American ● Feb. 7, 2023

Picture taken through a ball mill machine June 28, 2019.

From Reuters ● Jul. 1, 2022

An employee measures a newly manufactured ball mill machine at a factory in Nantong, Jiangsu province, China June 28, 2019.

From Reuters ● Dec. 1, 2021

He stopped the ball mill, washed out the color gun and filled it with blue mass.

From "Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023