Millet - Dictionary Definition and Overview

Millet : (noun)
1: any of various small-grained annual cereal and forage grasses of the genera Panicum, Echinochloa, Setaria, Sorghum, and Eleusine
2: French painter of rural scenes (1814-1875) [syn: Millet, Jean Francois Millet]
3: small seed of any of various annual cereal grasses especially Setaria italica

Based on WordNet 2.0

Millet : \Mil"let\, n. [F., dim. of mil, L. milium; akin to Gr. ?, AS. mil.] (Bot.) The name of several cereal and forage grasses which bear an abundance of small roundish grains. The common millets of Germany and Southern Europe are Panicum miliaceum, and Setaria Italica.

Based on Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary

Note:

Arabian millet is Sorghum Halepense.

Egyptian or East Indian,

millet is Penicillaria spicata.

Indian millet is Sorghum vulgare. (See under Indian.) Italian millet is Setaria Italica, a coarse, rank-growing annual grass, valuable for fodder when cut young, and bearing nutritive seeds; -- called also Hungarian grass. Texas millet is Panicum Texanum.

Wild millet, or

Millet grass, is Milium effusum, a tail grass growing in woods.

Based on Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary

Millet : (Heb. dohan; only in Ezek. 4:9), a small grain, the produce of the Panicum miliaceum of botanists. It is universally cultivated in the East as one of the smaller corn-grasses. This seed is the cenchros of the Greeks. It is called in India warree, and by the Arabs dukhan, and is extensively used for food, being often mixed with other grain. In this country it is only used for feeding birds.

Based on Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)