millet, common name for several species of grasses cultivated mainly for cereals in the Eastern Hemisphere and for forage and hay in North America. The principal varieties are the foxtail, pearl, and barnyard millets and the proso millet, called also broomcorn millet and hog millet. Much millet is grown in China, India, Manchuria, the USSR, and Africa. Foxtail millet (Setaria italica) comprises 90% of the millets grown in the United States. Proso millet (Panicum miliaceum) is the chief cereal in parts of Asia and Africa; in the United States it is used for feeding poultry and cage birds. Millet seeds or grain have served man and domestic animals as food (e.g., groats) since ancient times. The plant is known to have been grown by the lake dwellers of Switzerland in the Stone Age, and it was sown by the Chinese in religious ceremonies as early as 2700 B.C. Millets are classified in the division Magnoliophyta, class Liliopsida, order Cyperales, family Gramineae.

Millet or Milé, Jean François, c.1642-1679, French landscape painter, known as Francisque, b. Antwerp. The Arcadian and imaginary Italian landscapes that are attributed to him (e.g., The Storm; National Gall., London) are painted in the manner of Gaspard Poussin and may be seen in numerous European galleries. His son, Jean François Millet, 1666-1732, was also a landscape painter.

Millet, Jean François, 1814-75, French painter. He was born into a poor farming family. In 1837 an award enabled him to go to Paris, where he studied with Delaroche. In 1849 he settled in Barbizon, where he executed such celebrated works as the Gleaners (1857) and the Angelus (1859), both now in the Louvre. He was associated with members of the Barbizon school by proximity and friendship rather than by stylistic approach or treatment of subject. As a painter of melancholy scenes of peasant labor, he has been considered a social realist. Millet's paintings are noted for their power and simplicity of drawing. His work is well represented in American museums, notably in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Millet, Francis Davis, 1846-1912, American illustrator, painter, and journalist, b. Mattapoisett, Mass. He had been a drummer boy in the Civil War before going to college. As a correspondent, Millet covered the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 for the New York Herald and the London Daily News and Graphic. He was war correspondent in the Philippines in 1898 for the London Times and for Harper's Weekly. His mural paintings, for which he was later well known, include Evolution of Navigation (Customhouse, Baltimore). Of his genre pictures, A Cozy Corner and An Old-Time Melody are in the Metropolitan Museum, and Between Two Fires is in the Tate Gallery, London. He became a member of the National Academy in 1885 and was first secretary of the American Academy at Rome. Millet lived in England much of his later life; he died in the sinking of the Titanic.

Turkish term referring to an autonomous religious community under the Ottoman Empire (circa 1300–1923). Each millet was responsible to the central government for obligations such as taxes and internal security and also had responsibility for social and administrative functions not provided by the state. Beginning in 1856, a series of secular legal reforms known as the Tanzimat (“Reorganization”) eroded much of their administrative autonomy.

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