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:
She used her opportunity to create a warts-and-all portrait of her over-educated and downwardly mobile milieu.
From Salon ● Aug. 30, 2026
Once outside the walls of Buddyland and into the surrounding wilderness, Kelly shifts from boxy TV framing and video texture to a cinematic widescreen ratio, but the milieu still seems half-real, half-stylized.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 28, 2026
“If he’d been born in the U.S. he’d be the CEO of a company or some wunderkind. It’s sort of unfortunate he was born in the milieu that he was. He’d be successful anywhere.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 21, 2026
The former is set in early ’80s L.A. among the same milieu of nihilistic infants that the series’ co-creator, Bret Easton Ellis, has been surveying since the ’80s.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 5, 2026
She said we couldn’t possibly understand what their social milieu was, before the Portuguese came.
From "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver
As so often in Hitchcock’s work, the choice of milieus determines the suspense and the moral significance.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 10, 2026
It speaks to how isolating online social milieus can be.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 9, 2026
Few milieus could be as seductively dramatic as that Chinese city in the 1930s, with its cosmopolitan glamour and wartime danger.
From New York Times ● Mar. 1, 2024
These narratives are like the water that we swim in, and hence are invisible to many people within these milieus.
From Salon ● Jul. 29, 2023
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
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
The lifetimes of Merchant and Ivory spanned generations in which the cultural landscape changed slowly but radically; they both came from milieux in which being openly gay wasn’t common or acceptable.
From The New Yorker ● May 19, 2017
To sum up: There are in me certain milieux especially favorable to imagination.
From Essay on the Creative Imagination by Albert Heyem Nachmen Baron
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.
