From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishmilieumi‧lieu /ˈmiːljɜː $ miːˈljɜː, -ˈljuː/ noun (plural milieux /-ljɜːz, -ljɜː $ -ˈljɜːz, -ˈljuːz, -ˈljɜː, -ˈljuː/ or milieus) [countable] formal EFFECT/INFLUENCEthe things and people that surround you and influence the way you live and think Proust’s work reflected his own social and cultural milieu. She never felt happy in a student milieu.
Examples from the Corpus
milieu• Lester lives and works in an academic milieu.• Will seems to thrive in the hard-driving, mind-altering milieu of rock and soul.• Up until the civil rights movement of the 1960s, they tended to marry only those from their own class and milieu.• None of his eighteen novels takes place in a Catholic milieu.• Our specific role in the political milieu is to upset the apple cart, which is precisely what happened in Florida.• And in fact, the isolation and weakness of the radical milieu put a premium upon commitment to an unqualified Utopia.• The Grotonian reflected not only the school itself but the social milieu that sent its sons there.• In such cases, neighbourhood rather than milieu may have brought people together.Origin milieu (1800-1900) French 